A Tale of Two Metrics: Research Assessment vs Recognised Excellence

We build an economics department entirely composed of Nobel Prize winners and evaluate it using standard research assessment metrics. Performing the same evaluation on existing departments, we find that the rating of our Nobel Prize department does not stand out from other departments. Compared to recent research evaluations, our Nobel Prize department's ranking is less stable. This suggests a significant effect of score "targeting" induced by the ranking exercise. We find some evidence that modifying the assessment criteria to increase the totatl number of publications considered can help distinguish the top.