Bryn Mawr Update

So I went to check out Bryn Mawr's web site in order to see what it said about open positions in the econ department after bemoaning the fact that the listing in the September JOE required at least 2 years of post-PhD experience. It turns out that the school lists an advanced assistant professor position (the one listed in the JOE) and an entry-level position (or maybe two). I don't encourage anybody else to apply to these attractive positions.

And it's no wonder. The department seems to consist of the chair, one other full professor, one associate professor, a visiting assistant professor, and a lecturer. Only five people! Maybe that's standard for a school of Bryn Mawr's size (it has 1,300 undergraduates). And I know that students can take classes at Haverford, but it still strikes me as a fairly small department.

Of course, that's one of the issues. If one is looking for a job at a liberal arts college it is encouraging to think of all the schools in all the states across the country. But if each school only has five faculty members then most will not be hiring in any given year. In that case, whether or not the first job you get out of graduate school is a good fit is a matter of a certain amount of luck. Perhaps even more so when you're looking for your first job in the middle of a recession.

September JOE

As we come to the end of September, I'm looking (anxiously) forward to the October JOE (that's Job Openings for Economists for those who don't know). The October JOE is the main source of job listings for newly-minted Econ PhDs and there is a certain amount of uncertainty as to how many openings there will be. Last year there were over 500 positions listed. Unfortunately, as the size of the current economic crisis became evident, many of these jobs were pulled and the job market tightened significantly. But before we see the larger and more important October JOE I thought I'd take a minute to look at the September issue.

Last year's September JOE had 182 listings of which 88 were full-time tenure or tenure-track academic positions in the U.S. and 59 were full-time non-academic. This year there are only 113 listings, a 38% decrease. Only 46 of these are full-time tenure or tenure-track U.S. academic jobs. That's down 47% from last year! That's um, not good. Non-academic full-time jobs were down to 29, slightly more than 50%.

There are a number of Canadian academic jobs (I love Canada!), but they all end with a disclaimer that Canadian citizens will be given preference. And one of the U.S. academic positions listed gave me pause. Bryn Mawr posted a listing for an assistant professor which looked great. After all, my grandmother, aunt, and cousin are all graduates. But BMC says that "applicants should have a minimum of two years post-Ph.D. teaching and/or research experience." Um, ok. I guess that puts me out since I expect to get my PhD in the Spring.

Now this type of requirement is fairly common in other fields. People go do post-docs or get adjunct positions for a couple years after they get their degree and then look for a tenure-track position after they've published. But economics has not usually had this type of requirement, I assume because of the extra demand from government and private industry. In fact, Bryn Mawr listed in 2008 (also in September) and only required that applicants expect their PhD at the time of appointment.

If this represents a trend it could be a problem for those of us finishing up in 2010. It's possible, given the soft job market last year that supply is higher this year than normal. If so, schools who are actually hiring (like Bryn Mawr), may feel that they're in a stronger position and can demand more (like experience) than they would usually be able to.

The October JOE should be out in ten days or so. We'll see.

Job Market Season

So, if all goes according to plan, I will be on the job market for newly-minted econonomics PhDs this year. We had our first job market meeting at school in which they told us to get our CVs and web sites done. I'm still supposed to get my CV edited, but you can see it here. My web site is up here. I've also added a brief teaching statement and results from two student surveys of classes I've taught at Maryland. I need to add a research statement and then I should be done with the peripheral materials.

Of course, the main thing I need to finish is my job market paper. It's coming along pretty well, but I still have a fair amount of work to do. I'm presenting it at our brown-bag lunch seminar in a few weeks and then I'll have about a month to finalize it.

The good news is that I've found some empirical evidence to support the main idea of the paper which is that people have loss averse preferences when making their education investment decision. I've found evidence of a quadratic function where education is the dependent variable and (log) average family income is the main explanatory variable. This shows that those with lower (and higher) family income will get more education than those with family income in the middle of the distribution.

There are a number of things I still have to do. I'm still working on the simulation, especially to match median income at each education level. I also need to simulate a basic model in which agents are not loss averse and simply have mean-reverting earning ability. This would be the main alternative explanation to my model. Hopefully this model will be unable to explain some of the moments in the data that my model can explain.

Once I'm done with all this I'll be ready to send it out to all the jobs I apply to, Assuming that anybody's hiring.