Tuesday, December 29, 2015

Job Market for Economics Ph.D.'s

In a post in today's Inside Higher Ed, Scott Jaschik discusses the latest annual jobs report from the American Economic Association.

Ne notes:
"A new report by the American Economic Association found that its listings for jobs for economics Ph.D.s increased by 8.5 percent in 2015, to 3,309. Academic jobs increased to 2,458, from 2,290. Non-academic jobs increased to 846 from 761." 
(That's an 11.1% increase for non-academic jobs, and a 7.3% increase for academic positions.)

The bounce-back in demand for graduates since 2008 is impressive:
"Economics, like most disciplines, took a hit after 2008. Between then and 2010, the number of listings fell to 2,285 from 2,914. But this year's 3,309 is greater not only than the 2008 level, but of every year from 2001 on. The number of open positions also far exceeds the number of new Ph.D.s awarded in economics."
And here's the really good news for readers of this blog:
"As has been the case in recent years, the top specialization in job listings is mathematical and quantitative methods."

© 2015, David E. Giles

4 comments:

  1. Well,in your opinion, is the interest in quantitative method a long term movement that might still play out in the early 2020's?

    I do love econometrics, but my PhD is quite far ahead of me.

    More seriously, this is a great blog. Keep up the good work: it forces us to think a bit more.

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    1. Stéphane: I think it is a long term movement, personally.There's a lot of momentum in the statistics community at large. If I were contemplating entering grad. school in economics in the next couple of years, I'd be making sure I was well prepared in econometrics, statistics, mathematics, and computing.

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  2. I'm of the opinion we are pushing statistics in economic too far. Obsession could really bad cause this is just a social science. For instance results from annual times series may be different from quarterly data. I hope we don't box policy-makers into a corner!

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  3. Hopefully this will also (eventually?!) become a trend in developing economies as well. When I enrolled in my PhD studies I knew that there exists something that's called "econometrics". Yet, as the time gone by, I've realised that if you want to have an actual impact in some field of economics, econometrics is "a must have" type of knowledge. So, I'm trying my best to improve my econometric skills every day, unfortunately only on a self-learning basis since a course or basically anything (seminar, workshop, etc) regarding contemporary issues in econometrics is an inconceivable thing in my country. Anyway, I'm not discouraged by that, and I will pursue my self-learning process, and I just want to add that this blog has helped me a lot so far. So, thank you for all your great posts, they are invaluable for students like me.
    P.S. I've been a regular visitor for quite a while now. Yet, this is my first comment (since I've found answers to all of my previous questions somewhere between the lines :)

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