[liricooli]

AFAIK, In economics there's pretty much a consensus of journal ranks amongst researchers.

If you want to be a tenured professor, you'd usually be expected to have at least a certain number of publications in the top journals.

Also, I remember an interesting comparison amongst the Top 10 Econ departments, that compared grad students and the amount of top-journal publications they had 5 years after graduation.

The bottom line was that the Top 5 students in MIT\Harvard really have much more publications than any other grad student. But, the median Harvard\MIT one doesn't perform better than any grad from tier 1 school