What’s the first business school that comes to mind when you think of financial research?
A plethora of B-schools on the U.S. East Coast could claim the mantle of first in finance thought leadership — Wharton, Columbia, NYU Stern, Harvard, and MIT Sloan are probably at or near the top of most lists. A handful of schools outside the U.S. also have a legitimate claim: London Business School, HEC Paris, CEIBS. But a new ranking based on publications in the world’s most influential journals crowns a somewhat unexpected winner: the University of California-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
In its new ranking of nearly 150 schools published in May, the Center for Finance and Accounting Research at the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis named Berkeley Haas the No. 1 school for financial research thanks to its professors’ prodigious output in a lineup of prestigious journals.The CFAR ranking is based on publication in six finance journals, 10 economics journals, three accounting journals, and two general business journals from 2000 to 2023. The ranking considers articles published only by finance professors, according to CFAR, “or non-finance professors who have published at least three papers in the top three finance journals”: the Journal Of Finance, the Journal Of Financial Economics, and the Review Of Financial Studies.
