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.