A Kent State professor was ranked in December in the top 100 economists in the world whose first publication was five or fewer years ago.

C. Lockwood Reynolds said he felt honored to be included on the list, created by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which also ranked Kent State’s College of Business Administration and Department of Economics in the top 25 percent of research institutes in Ohio.

Reynolds received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and started teaching at Kent State in 2007.

“It’s extraordinary,” said Richard Kent, a professor of economics and the chair of the department of economics. “It’s just a reflection of the quality of the work he’s doing. I think it’s excellent for the department, for the college and the university.”

Reynolds said The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis ranked him and the economics department using a database called Research and Papers and Economics.

“It’s an international database of work papers and published papers,” Reynolds said. “From there, they start to gather a lot of statistics. I think they come up with something like 30 different rankings based on things such as number of papers published, number of citations and the quality of the journals you publish. It’s a mix of quality and quantity.”

Reynolds said he focuses his research and teachings on microeconomics, labor economics, public economics and the economics of education.

“He’s clearly a very smart guy,” said Bruce Pucci, a Kent State alum who worked on research with Reynolds. “Everyone in the economic department is actually really good. There are a lot of young professors in the economic department that are currently doing a lot of great research.”

Pucci said that when he has worked with Reynolds, he has learned a lot of research skills that he brought with him to his current job.

Reynolds has been recognized with the college’s Tenured Teaching Excellence Award and has won the Outstanding MBA Professor Award four times.

“I don’t do my work for rankings,” Reynolds said. “I try and do quality research in everything I do, teaching and research. It’s nice when occasionally that gets recognized. The focus should always be on trying to do you job as best you can.”

Contact Chelsea Graff at [email protected].