Tuesday, February 14, 2012

How I survived the Econ Job Market


Come fall, I will collect my PhD from the University of Michigan and go to work as an assistant professor of finance at the Stony Brook University College of Business. It's a really excellent department, full of smart, good people doing interesting research, and it's in a really nice location, and, well, I'm very happy to be going there.

For me, this concludes the rite of passage known as the "economics job market" (or, to economists, simply "the Job Market"). It is difficult to overstate how important a component of the economics grad school experience the Job Market is. I'd always intended to do a lengthy post about the process, just to give outsiders a little taste of what it's like (kind of like I did with my first-year macro course). The problem is, when it came time to go on the Job Market, I went about it all wrong, ignoring or simply failing to follow almost every piece of advice that grad students receive. This is not to say that that advice is wrong; it's good advice! I'm just saying that I am a very unusual case, and therefore not the best person to be writing this post.

But heck, I'm going to write it anyway. Just keep in mind, my own approach is more of a "don't try this at home" kind of thing.

(Note: Economists can obviously skip most of this, since you know it already. For PhD students, I recommend reading John Cawley's guide to the job market instead of listening to anything I have to say. The following account is primarily for non-economists who want a window into our secret world.)


What is the Job Market?

The Job Market is the main process by which PhD economists get jobs, though not the only process. There are plenty of jobs outside the Job Market, which you get by applying in the normal way (cold calling, resume mailing, connections, etc.). But the Job Market has three advantages, namely:

1. The job advertisement, application, and interview processes are all centralized,

2. You get the resources of your academic department to help you send out your applications, and

3. You are almost completely assured of getting some sort of job at the end of the process.

Jobs that are included in the Job Market are almost all posted on one website: Job Openings for Economists, which is run by the American Economic Association. You find the jobs you want to apply for, you send a list of these to your department, and you find three or four people to write you letters of recommendation.

The department then does two things. The administrative people forward your letters to the employers, and the Placement Coordinator tries to help identify good targets to call and recommend you directly. (Here's a good place for me to give special thanks to Chris House, this year's Placement Coordinator at Michigan, who did a bang-up job, and put up with my unorthodox behavior with consummate patience.)

After applications go out, employers contact grad students for interviews. These interviews take place at the AEA's Annual Meeting in early January, which is a gigantic confab where most of the economists in the country go to eat free food and hobnob. As an interviewee, you generally don't have time to go to any of the presentations or speeches; you're running back and forth from hotel to hotel, going to interview after interview. This year's AEA Meeting was in Chicago.

You then wait a week or two, and the employers who are interested in you call you back and schedule a flyout. Flyouts, which happen in February and March, involve going to the place, meeting the people, getting taken to dinner, and presenting your research. After that, offers go out.

There is also something called the "Secondary Market" or "scramble," in which people who don't get jobs through the aforementioned process get matched with employers who couldn't find anyone to fill their slots. I don't know exactly how this works, but I think the Placement Coordinator has to do a lot of work, making phone calls and such. The sense I get is that essentially everyone at a top 50 school eventually winds up with some kind of job.

Which, if you think about it, is pretty awesome. Especially as things currently stand in our economy. Being an econ grad student has its drawbacks, but joblessness afterward is definitely not one of them.


What do you need in order to go on the Job Market?

You need a Job Market Paper, or "JMP." This is a piece of original research, usually the first chapter of your dissertation.

That's it! Really! That's all you need! In the words of the great professor Yusufcan Masatlioglu, "All you need is that one damn paper."

At your AEA Meeting interviews, you will mainly discuss your JMP. At your flyout, you will present this paper. You don't need to have published this paper; in fact, you don't need a single academic publication (most people save publishable papers for when they are already working as assistant profs, where the papers will count towards tenure). "All you need is that one damn paper."

The JMP is to economists what a demo reel is to animators. Although the research should be original and at least mildly interesting, the main purpose is to show off your skills - be they DSGE modeling, time series econometrics, game theory proofs, the ability to find novel instruments, or whatever. Whether or not you obtain a world-changing result is less important.

Actually, this is one area in which I didn't do the normal thing. My JMP (which you can read here) is more about an interesting result and a novel methodology than it is about showcasing my skills. Although I showed that I could run experiments and work with panel data, I didn't show the time-series econometrics or DSGE modeling skills I learned in my classes and in other research projects, and I definitely didn't show off any of the math skills that I have from my physics background. So my JMP, while (in my opinion) an interesting paper, wasn't really a complete "demo reel." That was risky.

For other examples of JMPs, check out the excellent papers of my fellow Michigan job candidates David Agrawal (tax), Jesse Gregory (labor/urban), Collin Raymond (micro theory), David Ratner (macro/labor), Caroline Weber (tax), Roy Chen (experimental), Gabriel Ehrlich (macro), Nora Dillon (labor), Bill Lincoln (trade), Noam Gruber (macro), and Brad Hershbein (education).


What kind of jobs do economists want from the Job Market?

Most economics grad students really, really want an academic job. It's part of the grad school culture to believe that academic jobs (or jobs at the Federal Reserve) strictly dominate all other kinds, regardless of money, location, or quality of the institution. (Keep in mind, I have no hard data to back this up, but this is just kind of the sense I get.) Consulting, for example, even though it pays more, is definitely viewed by most grad students as a fallback option. Maybe this is just because as a student in an academic department, you're surrounded by professors who chose the academic way of life, and so tend to think it's the greatest. And I guess if PhD students just wanted big bucks, they'd have gone for Masters in Financial Engineering instead.

Like most applicants, I applied to a mix of academic, private-sector, and government jobs; although I wasn't as dead set on academia as some of my peers, it ended up clearly being the best choice for me, given the quality of the department at Stony Brook.

Job Market applicants are strongly encouraged not to have location preferences - i.e., not to rule out any region of the country. I cant tell you how many times I heard this! "No location preferences!" But I had strong location preferences, and so in this way I totally flew in the face of everything I was told (sorry, Chris!). I wanted to live on one of the coasts, in or near a large city, preferably a place where I already knew a lot of people. So I ended up applying to far fewer places than most of my peers: whereas a normal Job Market candidate usually applies to about 120 places, I applied to only about 80. This meant that I got correspondingly fewer interviews at the AEA Meeting (14, which is slightly below the Michigan average). In the end I lucked out, finding a job in the NYC area where I have a number of friends. But stubbornly sticking to my location preferences was clearly a risky move ex ante.


What kind of Job Market candidates do the best?

In general, academic employers want someone who can publish a bunch of papers in top-ranked journals. Non-academic employers are rumored to want whoever the academic employers want, and some say that they content themselves with taking the people who didn't get the academic jobs (again, this seems weird to me, but whatever).

Academic departments often have "slots" to fill. Economics, as a profession, is divided into fields, and so a department will often look for a "macro person" who will be assumed to do things like DSGE macro models and VARs, or a "tax person," who will do, um, tax stuff. Etc. You signal what "slot" you will fill by what kind of things you put in your JMP, by what field classes you took, and to a lesser extent by what you say in your cover letter.

Yet another way in which I didn't take the usual path was in terms of what "slot" I went for. I took macro as my main field class, but my JMP, while relevant for macro issues, was not the kind of thing that macro people usually do. My JMP was an experiment. However, I also didn't apply to any of the traditional "experimental econ" schools (e.g. Texas A&M). So I was a bit of an unusual applicant, difficult to fit into a pre-existing slot. This probably hurt me somewhat; while in good hiring years, schools are much more likely to gamble on an idiosyncratic or unusual type of researcher, in bad years they are much more averse to that sort of risk...and this was not a good hiring year. It was definitely a big ex ante risk not to go on the Market in one of the standard categories.


What are the advantages and disadvantages of the way the Job Market is set up?

This part is purely subjective, of course.

The way the economics profession runs its Job Market has obvious advantages. With a centralized, standardized application system, you can send out a lot of applications in a relatively small time. The single location of the first-round interviews is incredibly convenient. And the fact that all the interviews and flyouts happen within a short space of time allows employers and candidates alike to weigh all their options and select the best fit (it also allows competitive bidding and negotiation). So as a market, I have to say that the Job Market works very well - exactly what we'd expect from the economics profession.

But I must say, the centralized system does seem to have some drawbacks. For one, the structure of the market forces departments to pick and choose where they push their own candidates. Typically, there will be a small number of "stars" that the department pushes very hard, in the hopes of getting them into top schools. The knowledge that there can only be a few of these "stars" is not lost on first- and second-year grad students. That can be stressful.

In general, the Job Market is very stressful for most of the people who participate in it, and not only because one's future hangs in the balance. The fact that everyone is doing the same thing at the same time, and judging their success by essentially the same criteria, invites people to spend their time comparing themselves to their peers instead of thinking about their own individual preferences and what they really want to do with their lives. This comparison is so frenzied and intense that the Job Market has its own anonymous forum, Economics Job Market Rumors, where the gossip flies fast and thick (here's a thread about yours truly; here's a second, and a third).

In fact, I must say that the whole process has a slightly unpleasant whiff of a hierarchical culture (the profession) telling people what to want in life, defining a game and then convincing people that winning that game is all that matters. I can't help being reminded just a tiny bit of the Japanese college entrance exam system.

I suppose that the latter is a big part of why I personally took such an unorthodox approach toward the Job Market. Instead of focusing on winning the game, I focused (perhaps excessively?) on doing only what I wanted to do. I wanted to do research that I thought was interesting, so I did it. I also wanted to apply only to places where I would really want to work, and so I did that too. I took the advice of the great urban economist Masahisa Fujita, who once told me just to do what I wanted to do and not to worry too much about where I ended up. That approach succeeded in lowering my stress level dramatically during the Job Market process (though it probably slightly raised the stress level of my dissertation committee and Michigan's Placement Coordinator, for which I apologize).

In the end, I found a great job; statistically speaking, I got lucky. The vast majority of economics job-seekers will benefit from being significantly more orthodox than I was, even if it comes at the cost of more temporary stress.

Anyway, the ever-exuberant anarchist in me looks at the Job Market and says: "Pah, look at this rigid apparatus of social control! Blow it all up. Decentralize it and leave everyone to their own devices. Let job seekers think about what kind of job and what kind of life they want instead of where they rank." But the pragmatist in me says: "No, this system works well. It's relatively quick and low-effort, and it ends up nearly guaranteeing a job to people who participate in it. That far outweighs the downsides." The pragmatist wins. And hey, the Job Market ended up working for me, so what do I have to complain about anyway?

(Final Note: In addition, I'd like to give special thanks to my thesis committee members, Miles Kimball, Bob Barsky, Uday Rajan, and Yusufcan Masatlioglu, for the nearly absurd amounts of help they've given me; Dave Agrawal and Jeff Smith, for all the valuable job-market advice; and, of course, Vinnie Vinjimoor of the UMich econ department front office, for being the most competent human being on the face of the planet.)

58 comments:

  1. Orange146:12 PM

    Congrats on getting what looks like a top rank position. I got my PhD in chemistry way back in 1975 and one was left to his/her own devices for the most part. Did a post-doc and ended up going into drug regulatory affairs which was a fun career that I had no clue about in grad school.

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  2. Anonymous6:59 PM

    Man, you guys have it super cushy. The science job market these days requires 5+ papers and a postdoc to have any shot at even a liberal arts position.

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    Replies
    1. Anonymous4:37 PM

      yep, but in science you co-author papers with up to 30 other people. My gf is in medicine, doing her PhD in Molecular Biology, and she published more than 30 papers, just during her residency. Try to do that in economics.

      Delete
    2. Anonymous11:33 AM

      Only first-author papers really count for the science job market. Multi-author publications are a bonus, but normally require substantial justification as to what precisely the contribution was (as it is normally typically small)

      Delete
  3. Congrats, Noah.

    Looks like you earned the beer I threatened you with a while back.

    Consider counter idea to the thrust of this post.

    What if your unorthodox approach enhanced rather than inhibited your chances of success?

    I can't help seeing it that way.

    You are not generic.

    Cheers!
    JzB

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  4. I didn't even know you were on the market! But well done, Noah. You have a bright career ahead of you.

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  5. Anonymous10:00 PM

    Congrats!

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  6. Congrats Noah! I am also in Long Island, at Hofstra, not to far from you. Get in touch if you ever feel like it, maybe I can give you a few pointers about the area.

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  7. Hurray for Professor Smith!
    :-)

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  8. Anonymous1:53 AM

    How much, if at all, did this blog help or hurt you in the final analysis?

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  9. Anonymous2:29 AM

    "Which, if you think about it, is pretty awesome. Especially as things currently stand in our economy. Being an econ grad student has its drawbacks, but joblessness afterward is definitely not one of them."

    Congratulations to you, but that is the opposite of awesome. Given the impact of economists on the world, it would be good if some lost their jobs and some found more difficulty getting jobs.

    Is it still the case that grad students at "top" schools think "Knowledge of the economy" is the least helpful attribute of a economist for succeeding in economics?

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  10. How much, if at all, did this blog help or hurt you in the final analysis?

    You know, I really have no way of knowing! Most people I talked to said that it would either help (by getting me noticed), or, more likely, have no effect either way. but in the end, I'm just not sure what effect it had.

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  11. If your new employer does not know about the blog it may come as an unwelcome surprise to them.

    Congrats on the job.

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  12. If your new employer does not know about the blog it may come as an unwelcome surprise to them.

    Oh no, they know! They like the blog.

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  13. Congratulations on getting a job.

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  14. Congratulations!

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  15. おめでとうございます!

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  16. Congrats. And the NYC area is better for it.

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  17. Anonymous10:49 AM

    "3. You are almost completely assured of getting some sort of job at the end of the process."

    If you're coming out of UMich :)

    As far as the location preference thing, I've always been a bit surprised how strong the "take the best job you can get" mentality is. I can see why faculty argue that (both from their own incentives to place students at good shcools and from the fact that your long-term career prospects are somewhat dependent on your initial placement) but quality-of-life seems really downplayed. I was even more unorthodox in that I only applied to a low-30's number of schools that were in locations and had programs that really appealed to me (which led to a very good interview and flyout rate). While I can imagine that it's possible I passed over a more prestigous institution that would have hired me if I'd applied, having been out for a few years now, I have a hard time imagining I'd trade my current job in a truly epic location for a slightly more prestigous position in a place I would have been miserable toiling away in. But as they say, your mileage may vary.

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  18. I have a hard time imagining I'd trade my current job in a truly epic location for a slightly more prestigous position in a place I would have been miserable toiling away in.

    Ditto. Where are you working?

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  19. BTW, thanks to all the people saying "congratulations"... :)

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  20. Anonymous11:51 AM

    I agree that having a consistent background would probably make for a stronger candidate. My research background is split between res econ and auction theory and perhaps was not strong enough in either to attract a lot of attention in this year's job market. Nonetheless I think breadth makes for a stronger researcher at the end of the day. Good job sticking to your guns.

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  21. Congratulations!

    Is that 2003 paper on the econ job market still relevant, after the Crash?

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  22. Oh, let's get together for a drink before you leave town (use my campus address, or my yahoo).

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  23. Noah

    Congrats!

    I read the job market gossip forums that you linked to for pure voyeurism. I must say, grad economists in general seem to be either OTT in rhetorical sarcasm or are incredibly whiny, cowardly bitches!

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  24. Speaking from the *other* side of the market.

    Much of what Noah says seems absolutely correct for one segment of the adacemic job market--the top grad schools as sources of supply and the top or near-to-the-top schools as sources of demand. But that's only a fraction of the entire job market.

    There are probably more jobs in teaching-oriented institutions than in R1s, and the process goes somethat differently there. We're still at eht AEA meetings, and we still hope to make offers early (that's when the best people are available), but our criteria are different, and what we want ot talk about is also different.

    So remember that it's not a single job market, it's a collection of inter-connected job markets, and what you do depends in large part on where you want to wind up.

    But congratulations to Noah on his first jos. I hope you won't be giving up the blog.

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  25. Those anonymous threads about you were about the funniest thing I've read in months.

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  26. Holy cow! Imagine my surprise. I'm an econ prof. I'm reading Mark Thoma's blog and click on one of his links. I find it is written by a guy who was a frosh in my dorm many years ago at Stanford and is now joining my (our) profession. Welcome, Noah.

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  27. Anonymous2:33 PM

    I hope you realize how privileged you are, even among grad students. You are completely wrong that everyone ends up with a job. I know people who have gone on the market year after year, stringing together unemployment, VAPs and lectureships that don't even offer health insurance. You are the 1%.

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  28. Congratulations. I predict a bright future. You are going to have more influence than 99.99 percent of the economists out there. Like it or not you are one of the elite.

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  29. Holy cow! Imagine my surprise. I'm an econ prof. I'm reading Mark Thoma's blog and click on one of his links. I find it is written by a guy who was a frosh in my dorm many years ago at Stanford and is now joining my (our) profession. Welcome, Noah.

    Haha SERIOUSLY? Cam Shelton!! The man who punched me in the face with fluffy boxing gloves and sent my head into the corner of a wall!

    ...and you thought I forgot...

    It has been too long, buddy! See you on FB... :)

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  30. I hope you realize how privileged you are, even among grad students. You are completely wrong that everyone ends up with a job. I know people who have gone on the market year after year, stringing together unemployment, VAPs and lectureships that don't even offer health insurance. You are the 1%.

    Well, I did say "at top 50 schools"...

    Still, nobody should do what you're describing, going on the market year after year. Go get a real job! Have a life! Be happy! I probably could have been happy just editing books in Japan for the rest of my life, to be honest.

    There are SO many interesting and fun and awesome things to do in the world besides being an econ prof, and you don't need to go to a top school to do them.

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  31. Anonymous3:19 PM

    Haha, you just assume the people who can't get jobs COULDN'T have gone to good schools, MUST be defective somehow. Unemployment as a moral failing, love it.

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  32. Haha, you just assume the people who can't get jobs COULDN'T have gone to good schools, MUST be defective somehow. Unemployment as a moral failing, love it.

    What??

    I'm saying that if you don't get an academic job it's not the end of the world. And I'm saying that there are lots of great jobs for which you don't need a great pedigree, whether you could go get the pedigree or not.

    That has nothing to do with whatever you're talking about. "Moral failing"???

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  33. Anonymous3:32 PM

    You said, and I quote "Well, I did say "at top 50 schools" ", the clear implication being, anyone who went to a top 50 schools can expect your promised zero unemployment rate, that anyone who is not currently enjoying your promised zero unemployment rate must not have gone to a good school. The clear implication of THAT is that people who do "good work" will find jobs, and the contra positive is, if you don't have a job you don't do good work. Ergo, anyone without a job has only themselves to blame for not being good enough, and should go flip burgers or something "besides being an econ prof."

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  34. Anon:

    That's not at all what I was trying to say. First of all, I don't equate going to a top 50 school with "doing good work." Second of all, I don't think that flipping burgers is the natural alternative to being an econ prof.

    So chill.

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  35. Anonymous4:45 PM

    Congrats ! You summary of a good JMP lacks something crucial : it HAS to be written in Latex ! On that point, you were signaling your skills as much as your fellows from Michigan. Plus the easily identifiable graphs from Stata.

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  36. Anonymous4:45 PM

    I interviewed you at Stony, and you told me to leave some comment on the blog so, congrats!

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  37. Consider yourself lucky, as most of us regular mortals do not have such a clear-cut path from gradumation to employment.

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  38. I interviewed you at Stony, and you told me to leave some comment on the blog so, congrats!

    Thanks! :)


    You summary of a good JMP lacks something crucial : it HAS to be written in Latex ! On that point, you were signaling your skills as much as your fellows from Michigan. Plus the easily identifiable graphs from Stata.

    Hmm, never thought of that! I just assumed everyone used Latex and Stata.

    Actually, one time someone asked me to write up a paper draft in Word. It was a pain in the butt! You can see that paper up on my web page, actually ("Affect and Expectations")...IMHO it definitely doesn't look as good as Latex!

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  39. Congratulations! You know I'm a big fan and wish you the very best, in large part because the more success you have, the more influential you can be.

    It's interesting you're an assistant professor of finance, and not economics. I got as far as ABD in finance at Arizona, and at least there the finance department was pretty different from the econ. Why did you end up in finance, and what difference do you think it will make?

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  40. Congratulations Noah, they're lucky to have you. And since you'll be in the neighborhood (broadly defined) maybe we can meet for coffee again sometime. Some unsolicited advice... keep blogging, but don't let it consume you to the point that research gets crowded out. I think you probably have some interesting contributions to macro in you.

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  41. Anonymous11:38 AM

    Congratulations! The Job Market is certainly vital if you are predominantly interested in academia or the Fed or some of the consulting firms. However, if you're more interested in a private-sector, traditional "business economist"-type job, then it's not so much help as I found out. If the latter is the case, then the traditional job-searching tools are necessary. The NABE website now has a useful job board useful for both new graduates and professionals looking for new positions.

    BP
    (An old Michigan Econ PhD from back in the days when the www was some newfangled fad.)

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  42. Anonymous12:46 PM

    Noah,

    I've never seen so many positive comments on a blog. You must be a decent guy.

    Whenever I meet a physicist turned economist/finance phd, I always say, "couldn't you have fixed cold fusion instead?"

    Congrats.

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  43. I direct a team and employ PhD economists in the private sector.  Often (but not always) recent grads.  I used to be an academic with tenure.  I would make a few points:
     
    1. In academia, you have to teach but can otherwise do undirected research. 
    2. In the private sector, you have to do client directed work but can otherwise do (largely) undirected research on relevant topics.
    3. If you're into empirics, the data in the private sector is a million times better quality.
    4. If you're a theorist and you're not given challenging problems in the private sector, you're not trying hard enough.
    5. People from Ivy League schools, with tenure track offers from other Ivy League schools sometimes choose the private sector and flourish.
    6. Being a B+ academic in in a B+ school may not be much fun as you realize that OK universities are mainly in the business of churning out graduates.
    7. Publishing is hard.  Even if you go to the private sector, you should try to publish one thing in an OK journal.  It validates your PhD and tells people you weren’t just some prof’s RA.
    8. More people will read your stuff if you’re writing in the private sphere

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  44. I've never seen so many positive comments on a blog. You must be a decent guy.

    Whenever I meet a physicist turned economist/finance phd, I always say, "couldn't you have fixed cold fusion instead?"


    Haha, thanks! :)

    Yup, fusion would have been my second choice of career path. Too risky, though - I'd be highly unlikely to succeed!

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  45. Thanks for posting this, it's so interesting!! I'm glad I found this great blog (thanks Greg Mankiw) although it's kind of bad timing since I have a metrics test tomorrow that I'm supposed to be studying for....

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  46. This post brought back memories. Location? I interview at a school in Lubbock, Texas once thinking "get me on a plane back home NOW". And the interview at the University of Houston was worse. Thankfully I ended up in Los Angeles and now live in New York City. Congrats on getting a position you like. Love your blog!

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  47. Congratulations! Don't miss ICON - make a special trip this year if you have to. (http://iconsf.org/)Best total immersion introduction to SB and SB students that I know of. (Yes, I'm an alum, and proud of it)Also, it's fun.

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  48. Anonymous9:37 PM

    Congrats Noah. I'm not an economist but I really enjoy what you have to say. Best of luck to you.

    Dave Bradford
    davebrad@embarqmail.com

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  49. Tina Donnelly1:28 AM

    Sounds like you think the interesting story is the job market, when really it's that job rumors website. Is this supposed to be some sort of forum for... intellectual debate? ... seems like just a place for peers and co-workers to be aholes to e/o. Are there appropriate equivalents in other disciplines for this kind of public, draging-through-the-mud?

    Also, what's your take on the Agricultural/ Natural Resources Econ fields? Same deal?

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  50. Noah,

    Fascinating post, this information is hard to find, so muchos kudos for taking the time to write it.

    I glaring question I have after reading about this process, is where does the innovation come from?

    For instance, I find most of the techniques used in academic economics to be ill suited for the questions posed. Trying to build models using only closed-form expressions and proofs leads to both dropping out variables and factors that are hard to fit in the equation. It also makes the logic almost impossible to follow. Many times in an economics study the important thing is not the proof, but the sensitivity of the results to different assumptions, variables, and ways of interacting. The type of math in econ papers rarely is helpful in that sort of exploration.

    I enjoy economics and have read dozens of books and academic papers. I have sometimes thought of applying for grad school. But I am a software engineer by training now, and if I did research in economics, I would want to build agent simulation models using very clearly written python or ruby code.

    Are there universities out there that support such unconventional methodologies? Or does one have to follow an existing, well-trod modeling or econometric technique until one is secure in tenure?

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  51. Jasmin5:31 PM

    As an Economics PhD student in the UK, it's interesting to read how the "searching and matching" works in the fresh grad job market for economists in the US. Perhaps one day you can write a research paper looking at how herding behaviour may affect the career decision-making among Economics doctoral students in your country.

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  52. xiaochu3:27 PM

    Prof. Smith:
    This is the post I was reading. :D This post is just good for me right now.

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  53. neilla11:18 AM

    Just to chime in from the perspective of someone who's all too familiar with a "decentralized" alternative market system, in political science: it's a horrible idea. Applicants, even from top 10 schools, are regularly left without positions, and search committees regularly close lines rather than hire.

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  54. Anonymous6:07 PM

    "AEA's Annual Meeting in early January, which is a gigantic confab where most of the economists in the country go to eat free food and hobnob"

    what happened to the no-free lunch ideal?

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  55. Anonymous11:51 AM

    So, do GPA score doesnot matter for the Job market? And whether you have taught undergrads while in the PhD program. Is Job Market Paper the only thing that matters? I am less interested in teaching and more interested in research. Thanks for the post and congratulations for your job!!

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