econjobrumors is back

This is now (very) premature RIP EJMR (2008-2026) - by Christopher Brunet - Chris Brunet

I'm a 2nd year PhD student. Many of my required readings are challenging to read. A lot of the times the reading introduces me to a canonical model/framework for the first time, which is even more challenging for me to read. In the past I've frequently asked AI to explain course notes, although I've currently been trying to refrain from doing so.

Any thoughts about the use of AI as a paper reading helper for young researchers?

Is there a distinction between asking for an explanation on method heavy papers (e.g. Technology, Geography and Trade Eaton Kortum 2002; Sufficient Statistics for Welfare Analysis Chetty 2009) vs more topics focused empirical papers (e.g., Chetty et al. 2014)? Do people think there are certain questions a young researchers should never ask (e.g., the strengths/contributions of the paper, how to interpret figures or regressions)?

Would love to hear thoughts people have, especially if anyone has experimented with what they think was best for their learning.

Edit: Thanks for all of the comments! I will continue to not use AI as a reading assistant. I'm surprised more people didn't say they use AI as an assistant for following proofs/derivations.

Which school has the better economics department

Do you at least provide the skeleton, or do you simply "vibe code" (eg. "read the data in [folder] and run fixed effects regression") and then re-examine the code afterwards? What is the "right" way to approach things?

I am so overwhelmed by choice right now, the same thing happened last year and I had decided to take a gap year after my masters, and I am overwhelmed now once again.

I am F(22) from India, I have just finished my masters and am acting as a visiting faculty in the college I did my MA from. (St. Xaviers College, Mumbai University)

I am just overwhelmed by the amount of paths we have/can take. For example, I could do a second masters and then go for a PhD or do a predoc or take 1 more year to publish papers and gain more research experience, or I could just do a PhD in India after clearing the country level selection exam, or I could apply now directly for a PhD, but even then there are infinite directions in which country to do it, which professor to do it under, etc.

So you get the gist, there’s way too many combinations, and everytime I feel like I have decided upon one thing, I find out about something new and rethink everything all over again, because I am also not very confident in my application. I do have good grades (9.2/10 MA CGPA, 9.5/10 BA CGPA), I did give IELTS last year and got 8.5/10 and have English medium proofs from both my colleges. Additionally I won best dissertation (masters) in my college, which made me slightly more confident but I am still in the process of getting published. And I am writing one more paper but at this point I am just so lost I have no motivation.

I do know I wanna do my doctorate in something related to economic history/environmental, developmental economics, possibly an intersection of the two but I feel like there are so many institutions and departments and I am not even aware of any of it.

I tried discussing with the professors I know but everyone is kinda unaware or unwilling to share any tips that can help me out here. They didn’t even guide me through how to get my paper published or help me select a possible journal that is proper.

I am wanting to apply this year, currently my top university choices are- LSE, EUR, NYU, University of Bologna, University of Gothenburg, UC Berkeley. I am open to more but as far as I am aware these Unis have a strong history/environmental economics program. I am trying to get in touch with the professors and PhD students there currently but barely getting any responses on cold emails. Also funding is a huge question mark, I cannot afford to do a self-funded study.

At this point more than a specific admissions question I just don’t know where to begin? It feels like in this 1 year that I took I have narrowed down a PhD direction but again I am open to changing it for any university of my choice where I can get a fully funded scholarship. I am not sure if I want to give a GRE, can I even get admissions without that? What would make my application strong enough apart from publishing papers? As I said now I do have teaching experience, I also am applying for RA jobs whenever they come out so that should make it better as well, anything else?

How do I narrow down a direction in this infinite options? I have also joined a counsellor agency and they aren’t much help as they are constantly pushing me to select a country and then apply instead of looking overall at the programs and how good those are.

Either ways I am open to anything, just a little guidance at this point probably would help. I know for sure I love research and teaching and want to get into academia, I definitely want to do a PhD. I know somehow if I have a direction I can muster up the skills and work on my caliber.

I don’t know if it is relevant but I also have been diagnosed with ADHD & OCD in 2023.

I want to learn more about economics. I've never taken an econ class. Studied psychology and computer science in my undergrad. Ideally, I'd like to take a college course in econ, but working full-time has made that difficult with other responsibilities.

Assuming that I can't take a regular full-time economics course, what are the best routes/resources for learning economics? Are there online asynchronous courses you'd recommend? Books?

Heads up for anyone interested in health economics: the HEPARD Online Research Seminar Series kicks off its first season on September 18 with Adriana Lleras-Muney from UCLA. Her research looks at how education and income shape health and mortality outcomes, so should be a good one for anyone working on health/labor econ.

Details:

• September 18, 3:00pm CET (Fridays, 15:00-16:30 CET)
• Fully online, free to join
• Registration link gets you the Zoom link plus updates for the rest of the season

Full lineup for 2026/27 also includes Holger Strulik, Owen O'Donnell, Anupam Jena, Davide Dragone, Manasvini Singh, Sonia Bhalotra, and Mariacristina de Nardi, running through April.

Registration: https://goek.wiwi.uni-due.de/en/research/hepard/

Hi I am a french student starting a master's degree in international economics this fall, and feel a bit disappointed in myself.

My goal was originally to do a PhD in environmental economics / public policy/ resource economics in north america.

Despite all of my work in my bachelor's (4.0 gpa in international economics, internship abroad and exchange year in the USA with a 4.0 gpa), I'm worried that this degree might "hurt" my PhD applications as it is not very well ranked (T15/20 in france).

I always had an average between 15 and 17/20, in macro and microeconomics, maths applied to econ, statistics, economic policy, financial accounting, international economics

and more "business" courses : comparative business law, marketing, HR, risk management.

Once I left for the US I maintained a 4.0 gpa in accounting, microeconomics, business analytics, statistic, international management, international business, marketing and american politics. (Not sure if this is all very relevant for PhDs applications)

I chose this master's as it has a "phd research track" where I could still try to do some research and start a research proposals for PhDs applications. (I currently have 0 proper research experience). But ultimately I'm scared that it might not have a good ranking, lead me to not have a ton of connections, or not strong recommendation letters.

Can this hurt my future applications ? Would it be better to stay in this degree and be in the top5/10 or try to transfer to a more prestigious school but risk falling in the top 20/50 ?

I'm already looking into transfering for my 2nd year into master's degrees more focused on environmental economocs, but I'm also wondering if transferring could look bad as part of my applications.

I didn't consider most of the PhDs that I had looked into unattainable, ( UVM, Umass Amherst, Tufts, UConn...), but I am getting more worried about it as time passes.

As most of those PhDs do not require the GRE, I am also unsure about taking it.

If anyone has any piece of advice, even solely related to PhD applications with a similar background, I'll gladly take it.

Thank you !

Spanish undergrad, economics, final year.

Profile:

• GPA 9.3/10 (Spanish scale), with distinction (matrícula de honor) in more than 50% of my courses, including the full econometrics and quantitative sequence.

• Research experience: a research assistantship at my own university, plus a summer research position at another Spanish institution.

• Econometrics: full sequence: cross-section and panel, time series and forecasting (Enders, Hendry), cross-section and panel data (Greene), and applied microeconometrics and causal inference (Angrist-Pischke, Cameron-Trivedi).

• Math: calculus (single and multivariable), matrix algebra and diagonalisation, integration and series, difference and differential equations. No real analysis, since it isn’t offered in my bachelor’s, and I know that’s the gap in my file.

Plan: masters this cycle (LSE, TSE, and some Spanish research-oriented programmes like CEMFI, BSE, and UC3M), plus PhD applications as a lottery ticket. If I could skip the master’s and go straight to a PhD, I would.

Long-term goal: I’d like to end up as an economist in industry. The tech econ teams (Amazon, Uber, Zillow, that world) are what I’m aiming at, rather than academia. Mentioning it because I assume it changes what “the right program” looks like.

My actual question is narrow: ceteris paribus, how much does 169 or 170 change a profile vs 168? Do econ adcoms read 168 vs 170 as meaningfully different, or is anything above a certain score just a checkbox?

I’m asking because of percentile compression. With current ETS tables a 170Q is only the 91st percentile, and 165 has dropped to around 67th. So 168 isn’t far from the ceiling in raw terms, but it’s also not “90th percentile” anymore. Plenty of program pages still say “admits are typically above the 90th percentile,” which I assume was written when scores were not as compressed, but I don’t know whether adcoms have actually updated their internal benchmarks.

P.S Given the applied micro / causal inference orientation and the industry goal, any program recommendations that fit? I’ve got the obvious European names on my list, but I’d be interested in anything that places well into tech econ teams and that I might not have on my radar (especially outside of continental Europe). Thanks in advance!

I was reminded by my PI about the deaths of two prominent economists at the top of their careers, Alan Krueger and Martin Weitzman, and she made me reflect on why I want to be an economist in the first place.

Obviously I am not saying economics or academia caused their deaths. We don’t know that. But both had essentially reached the summit of what people here spend so much time worrying about: Princeton, Harvard, famous papers, influence, etc. And still, none of that makes someone immune from being human.

It made me think about how much we micro-benchmark ourselves in economics. US T10, T20, predoc prestige, adviser prestige, placements, journals, who is “ahead” at 25. I do it too. However, at some point useful career information seems to turn into a very strange way of measuring your own worth.

Foucault talks in The Birth of Biopolitics about the neoliberal subject becoming an “entrepreneur of himself”. (ECON)Academia sometimes feels like a perfect example. A BSc/MSc becomes an investment, predoc a signal, you choose supervisors based on potential reputational capital, papers become assets, and colleagues become benchmarks. Eventually you are constantly marking yourself to market.

And nobody even has to force us to do it. We do it to ourselves.

I just want to remind people that there is not one ladder. I think academic Reddit forgets this constantly. You can do a PhD and become a professor, but you can also go to a central bank, government, OECD, World Bank, consulting, industry, finance, tech, think tanks, research institutes, etc. You can leave academia. You can come back. You can choose a “worse” department because you love the supervisor, city or life there.

None of this means don’t be ambitious. I want good programmes and good research opportunities too. However, ambition should serve the life you want, not become the life itself.

I doubt most of us became interested in economics because we wanted to be a “T20 economist”. Something actually interested us: inequality, development, labour, climate, macro, political economy, whatever. Maybe it is worth remembering that person before every interesting question becomes “can this publish well?” and every colleague becomes someone to rank yourself against.

There will always be someone younger, somewhere better ranked, with another publication or a more famous adviser. Hence if your satisfaction depends entirely on relative position, you have designed a game with no finish line.

And if someone takes a less prestigious job because they like the city, want children, want to be near their partner, want time for friends and books, or simply want to enjoy their life, maybe they did not misunderstand the optimisation problem.

TL;DR: stop micro-benchmarking yourself. There is no single economics ladder, prestige is not intellectual worth, and a PhD opens plenty of doors outside academia. Remember why you wanted to do economics before everything became a ranking.

Alternatively, if you really can’t imagine another one, what makes you love yours?

Two oft-mentioned names I see held in high regard. Why are these men important to Economics and are there other contemporary names whose work I should follow?

For context: I’m a 2nd year undergrad Econ student who reads as much of the financial press and Econ research articles/papers as possible.

I have a Bachelor's in Quantitative Economics and want to go to Graduate school but I am not sure what to major on..? I don't know if I want to move more for buissnes, stay in econ, or move somewhere else entirely. For those who graduated in Econ, what did you guys do?

A few months ago, I cold-emailed a very senior and well-known economist who runs a research lab. They responded very kindly and essentially told me to finish my econometrics course, reconnect afterward, and that they hoped they could find some way for me to become involved with the lab.

I completed the course in August and emailed them again as they had asked.

Around the same period, I also tried reading one of their papers with a coauthor and sent them a separate email explaining how I was trying to understand the empirical strategy using what I had learned in econometrics. It was genuinely one of the first papers where I felt I could start understanding some of the empirical work rather than only the conclusions.

I did not receive a response to my post-course email, so after roughly two weeks I sent one polite follow-up. I haven't heard back yet.

For additional context, this economist has interacted with me on LinkedIn before, including reacting to some of my posts/comments, so the original response did not feel like a completely generic reply.

I understand that very senior academics are incredibly busy, and I also understand that saying they would hopefully find a way to involve me was not a promise of an RA position.

I'm mainly wondering how people who have worked with faculty or research labs would interpret this.

Would you assume:

they are simply busy and the email is sitting in their inbox;

they may need to check with people in the lab/projects before giving me an answer;

there currently isn't an opportunity and they haven't gotten around to saying so;

or that I should interpret the lack of response as a soft no?

I'm not planning to email again anytime soon. I'm mainly trying to understand what is normal in academia because, as an undergraduate, I don't have much experience with situations like this.

I'm a 2nd year PhD student who is starting some field courses with applied theory and structural estimation (e.g. Robert Townsend's work on risk in village economies or BLP demand estimation). I'm a bit lost as to how to read the theory papers for class.

I have a decent system for reading empirical papers: figure out the Research Question and Contribution from the introduction, and then think about the "internal validity" by focusing on the most important figure, regression, or bottom-line result. Then chat with others about the paper.

How should I approach reading theory papers especially when there isn't a key regression to orient myself around? I d And should I be approach older theory papers differently than newer theory papers (an old theory paper could be Market for Lemons by Akerlof)?

Hey everyone,

I’m a first-year Economics PhD student at a [Top 100] US program. Looking at the current state of the academic economics job market, I am feeling pretty disillusioned. The trend looks incredibly bleak, and I’m seriously considering taking the terminal master's exit after my second year (passing comps) to pivot to industry.

My primary target is the quant space (quant research or quant development/modeling), but I want a realistic gut check on my feasibility.

My Background:

• Math: Pretty solid. Standard real analysis, linear algebra, differential equations, and a strong foundation in mathematical statistics and probability from my undergrad and first-year PhD coursework.
• Coding: This is my main bottleneck. I have some basic exposure to Python, R, MATLAB and Stata from econ research.

Assuming I spend the next 1.5 to 2 years aggressively self-teaching myself the requirements for quant alongside my master's coursework, how competitive would I be for entry-level quant roles?

Specifically:

1. Do firms view a "failed" PhD / terminal Econ MA as a red flag, or do they just care if you can pass the technical rounds?
2. Is an Econ background (even with heavy math) still respected in quant research compared to Stats/Math/CS PhDs, or will I be filtered out automatically by HR?
3. Are there specific niches within quant (like macro funds) where the Econ toolkit gives me an edge despite the weaker coding start?

Would love to hear from anyone who made a similar exit, or anyone currently hiring in the quant space. Thanks in advance!

Hi everyone, I could really use some advice because I’ve been overthinking my situation lately.

I recently didn’t get a scholarship for top US programs that I was really hoping for, mainly because of my GPA. I have around a 2.47/3.0, and I’m from a developing country, so funding is a major consideration for me.

My GPA is obviously my biggest weakness, although I think there is some context behind it. I got a C in a foundational Economics course during my first year due to extreme circumstances, but my quantitative grades are considerably better: Micro A, Macro B, and Statistics/Math mostly A–B.

I’ve also been trying to strengthen my quantitative background, taking around 200 hours of intensive Python and Mathematics courses, plus additional self-directed math coursework. Professionally, I have experience in public administration.

I’m now considering Master’s programs in Economics/Finance at UChicago, LSE, Bocconi, and ETH, but I’m unsure how realistic these options are with my GPA.

Can strong quantitative grades, additional math/Python training, work experience, recommendations, compensate for a low overall GPA to some extent? Or would a 2.47/3.0 make these programs extremely unlikely regardless?

The other big question is financial. If I were admitted without funding, I would probably need to finance the Master’s through loans at around 5% annual interest. Coming from a developing country, that would be a significant financial commitment.

Would you still apply in my position? And if admitted, do you think the career opportunities from these programs could justify taking on that level of debt?
I’d especially appreciate advice from anyone familiar with LSE/Bocconi/CEMFI admissions or who has been in a similar situation. Thanks!

I am a college student taking an economics course, however it takes time for me to understand certain concepts and actually remember them. I can understand them at the spot but later in I cannot remember.

Are there any resources available like studying platforms, games, simulators that will allow me to better understand it?

I want to be able to actually comprehend and explain it.

Thank you!

Hello everyone, I have a very unusual profile and I'm in an odd position, so I would like to seek anyone's opinion.

I'm entering the final year of my Data Science degree without any economics coursework. Halfway through my degree, I took some finance electives and got very interested in finance. That led me to study for and pass the CFA Level I exam (which covers material typically taught in the first two years of a finance degree, including a bit of econ) and obtain internship experiences. However, I realized through the internships that I really didn't like working in finance industry and that I am actually interested in financial theories. For example, I found theories explaining why corporations make certain decisions (like M&A) fascinating, but I noticed industry doesn't care about theory at all and all they care about is money.

I did a lot of research, chatted with a finance professor, and discovered that corporate finance research falls under financial economics, which needs pretty strong economics and econometrics knowledge. Currently, I have a 4.0 GPA with plenty of math, statistics and CS courses, but I foolishly didn't take any econ course :(

My long-term goal is to become a Finance PhD, and my plan right now is to enter into a MSC/MA economic/finance program that explicitly accepts students without an econ background. Does anyone have any opinion on my plan?

My current targets are LSE Econ (2 years stream), Duke MS Economics and Computation, and UBC MS Finance.

Hi all,

I've just received the attached email relating to my (initially rejected) application to join the Oxford MPhil- and I'm just wondering if anyone has any experience of this process- is this a blanket email sent to all candidates, those at the top of some rejection list?

Any input from anyone with any experience/ knowledge of this situation appreciated.

Stressing me out as I was in the process of signing for a house at my second choice when I got this email and would let the kind people of FB down if I dropped out.

Hi everyone, I am a final year student at University of Sydney (Australian) with majors in economics and finance with 85, high distinction WAM, (weighted-average-mark), I believe this is equivalent to a UK first.

Basically, I am hoping to get some people’s opinions on whether I have a realistic shot at getting into Oxbridge/LSE masters programs if I apply. Since I am in Australia, I will have to do GRE tests, and I don’t really want to put a lot of money/effort into GRE tests and applications unless I have an okayish chance of getting into one of these programs.

For context, I have completed introductory and intermediate econometrics alongside my economics major, which are listed as essential for admission to the programs. However, I have not done any more advanced econometric/quantitative coursework than that, which I understand is highly valued by the admissions people?

If I don’t apply/don’t get in to any of these programs my alternative plan is probably to stay at Usyd and do Master of Economic Analysis.

I would also be interested in people’s sense if these programs are financially worthwhile to undertake, even if I do get in. The aforementioned UK degrees cost approx $100-120k aud versus ~$25k aud for similarish type of program in Sydney. I think the idea of studying at a prestigious university in the UK is really cool, but I would also like any opinions on whether it is really a financially worthwhile venture? (long-term goals are to be a bank economist or something like that).

Thank you for taking the time to read this post and responses would be greatly appreciated!

I'm entering my 2nd year PhD at a T10 US econ dept, and I'm interested in the economics of AI. The field seems scary big, with lots of new papers coming out, with people like Goldfarb, Gans, Agarwal, Alex Imas, Erik Brynjolfsson, Sendhil Mullainathan, and ofc Acemoglu, among several dozen other top economists contributing regularly to the field.

Is there a structured way to become familiar with the literature and the main questions and models that are being used in this sub-field right now?