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