In the case of the UK, the RAE is a peer reviewed process, so most of
the bureaucratic effort falls on people like us, both in preparing these
reports of our research activity and in assessment of quality.  While it
is no doubt likely that economists approaching this assessment task will
use journals to "signal" something about their notions of quality, our
colleagues in history tell us that there is no heirarchy of
journals/publishers etc, and that they will read everything!  

But Roy Weintraub is correct when he says that invitations to funded
conferences/workshops are more useful to English colleagues than
complaints - not only do we have the benefit of useful academic
engagement with our peers elsewhere, but these invitations are counted
amongst the signals of "esteem" in the international environment in the
assessment!

What do these ranking schemes do? Well of course they have intended and
unintended consequences - many of the latter discussed by Mike Power in
his book The Audit Society.  One of the unintended consequences has been
to make a market for academics in middle career years, a market which
did not exist to any degree before these assessment exercises started.
Another outcome - to my surprise - has been to make more marginal fields
marketable - for example, a mid-ranked economics department offering a
move with promotion to a good economic historian as a way to increase
their ranking.  I am still waiting to see an example where this works
for an historian of economics however.

Mary S. Morgan