The websites econjobmarket.org and AEAweb JOE are centralized job finding sites for economics PhDs. These have databases of application materials of thousands of job candidates, and the interviews many of them got. The subsequent jobs and publications of the job candidates are listed on the web. There are many empirical projects that can be done with this data, for example how certain keywords in recommendation letters predict the job that a candidate gets, or how the CV at the time of job application predicts future performance. One comparison that has been done in the sciences (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2572075/) is how recommendations of male and female candidates differ, i.e. what words are frequently used for one gender that are not used for the other. It is likely that economics recommendation letters contain similar biases.
The professors of top universities who have access to the databases of the job market websites have an advantage in hiring. They can predict which candidates perform well in the future and offer jobs to those. The employers without access to the databases are left with less promising candidates.
Tag Archives: empirical project idea
Claims that the economics job market is tough this year
It seems that every year since I started grad school, I hear someone say that the economics job market is tough (for candidates) that year. Usually it is in connection with some graduate student on the market getting a less good job than one anticipated. But the toughness of the market is a relative measure, so relative to what year is this year tough? Relative to 1950? After the Second World War, the US expanded its university sector with the GI Bill, which created a large demand for new faculty members. This made the market easy for candidates and as the effect gradually faded, the market got tougher. This is probably not what people have in mind when they claim a tough market.
As computing power becomes cheaper, the demand for people who are substitutes of computers (theorists) falls and the demand for complements of computers (empirical and computational researchers) rises. So the theory market may get tougher for candidates over time, but the empirical market should get easier.
There are other long term trends, like the fraction of the population getting a university degree increasing, but at a decreasing rate. If the university sector expands to cater to the increased demand, the market should get easier for candidates. But this also depends on the expectations of the universities. Hiring responds to anticipated future enrollment, not just the current number of students. So if demand for university education rises less than expected (it does not have to fall), the demand for new faculty members falls.
Lengthening lifespans mean older faculty members free up fewer spots in universities, which reduces demand for new faculty members, but this effect is tiny, because lifespans lengthen very slowly.
A short term effect on hiring was the financial crisis, which reduced university hiring budgets. This made 2009 a tough year for candidates relative to the surrounding years.
A study on how tough the market really is would be interesting, but hard to do, because it requires a measure of the quality of candidates that is independent of the jobs they get or papers they publish. Both jobs and papers are subject to a congestion effect, so the toughness of the job market or publication market affects these measures. The definition of toughness is that the tougher the market, the worse the results for a graduating student of a given quality.
The market for economists is worldwide, so it would be easier to study academics in some field that is country-specific and thus has barriers to trade, say law.