I think looking at faculty research is always a worthwhile endeavor when learning about schools, and RePEc (linked to above) is certainly an interesting resource. If considering these schools and skimming through faculty research, I imagine there’s at least some interest in attending grad school. I think there’s more direct data on grad school matriculation, and I will return to that in a bit. But it’s wise for a prospective student to be wondering where are they more likely to get some research experience. Of course most undergrad research doesn’t lead to a publication, but it can, and either way faculty on campus doing research and publishing can be quite helpful for those seeking grad school entry, particularly when they involve undergrads in their research, as is often the case at LACs due to the lack of grad students.
The RePEc ranks mentioned earlier in the thread use RePEc data consisting of both registered authors and declared work (papers, books, chapters, etc). In short, their data is a bit messy. They have six Econ faculty listed for Haverford, but only two appear to still be there. Moreover, one has to go back 10 years to see something captured by RePEc for either of those two faculty members. To be clear, I am sure Haverford’s excellent faculty have published in the last nine years, but the work used for the RePEc ranking was either done by faculty who have left or is 10+ years old. In contrast, Carleton has eight listed faculty still at the institution, and there are by my count 35 captured publications of various sorts in the last nine years (to Haverford’s zero.) As with Haverford, I am sure this does not represent all their Econ faculty or even all the publications of the registered faculty. As an example, Nathan Grawe’s work on the future demographics of higher ed which received a fair amount of national media coverage isn’t even in the RePEc inventory.
Perhaps less noisy data on relative strengths of Econ depts (at least for those considering grad school) comes from the NSF’s survey of earned doctorates. Various online sites have poured over the raw data and made attempts to present it in consumer-friendly format. One such site is College Transitions which has a couple tables for undergrad origins of Econ PhDs, one (on the left on my device) for raw counts, and one normalized for institution size to convey rate information. From the latter, one can see both Carleton and Haverford do exceptionally well at producing future PhD earners, ranking 13th and 19th respectively. Note these ranks include all institutions, not just LACs, though most (14) in the top 20 are in fact LACs.
As a fun side note, both Haverford and Carleton were mentioned at various places in the 2006 study out of Vanderbilt that stated PhD students who had attended LACs for undergrad study finished Econ doctorate programs an academic year faster than those attending universities for undergrad study. From the discussion on p18: “Applicants from Swarthmore, Williams, or Carleton, therefore, might be viewed appropriately as likely ‘less expensive’ Ph. D. students than those with a bachelor’s degree from Harvard, Berkeley, or Stanford.” A conclusive explanation for the differences appears beyond the scope of the paper, but there are brief mentions of the LAC students writing double the number of term papers, having higher verbal GRE scores, being more likely to have published, getting more attention from professors, and being more likely to have come from an academic family than their university peers.