5 Excellence in Research for Australia: An Audit of the Applied Economics Rankings Sinclair Davidson 1 Abstract The Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) Report attempts to quantify the quality of research undertaken in Australian universities in the ield of ‘Applied Economics’. The paper shows it is diicult to reconcile the ERA rankings with the underlying data drawn from the Scopus database. Since the ERA rankings cannot be replicated, and since the ERA process is non-transparent, its rankings should be treated with some caution. Introduction The second Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) National Report was released in December 2012. The importance of this Report cannot be understated. It will be used to allocate government funding to universities and also to separate out ‘top performers’ from ‘also-rans’. As Stephen Matchett (2012b) of The Australian wrote: Anybody contemplating an MBA can use ERA 2012 to assess every university claims that its bized (sic) staf are world-class researchers; in most cases they aren’t. Have a look at the commerce and management list, there is a majority of low and no scores. And the elite institutions can make the case they deserve all public research money, given they do so much of the world-class work. Of course everybody else can argue that the presence of Wollongong and Macquarie among the top performers makes the case for Canberra spreading the cash about. But that is an argument which applies to those two, not the 20 or so also-rans. 1 RMIT University, sinclair.davidson@rmit.edu.au. I thank William Coleman, Ashton de Silva, and two anonymous referees for valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper.