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...helping fill this in knowledge. These include Barbazat (1992), Carson and Navarro (1988), Cawley (2004), Ehrenberg (2004); List (2000), Siegfried and Stock (1999, 2004), Stock and Alston (2000), and Stock, Alston and Milkman (2000). While these articles provide a sense of the overall market, they do not provide information on the nuances of the market such as what is going on in buyers' minds when they select whom to interview, and when they ask an interview question. This article attempts to fill in some of that information by providing a case study of one particular buyer in the 2005 job market for economists, and distilling some advice to job seekers from that case study.
I. The Economics PhD Job Market
The market for PhD economists is open all year, but most activity takes place between September and April. There are numerous print and online sources for job postings but JOE is the primary source of information. (1) Listings in JOE by job seekers cost $250-$500, depending upon word count. Over the past five years, 1400-1600 academic jobs have been posted in the JOE annually, with approximately 70% posted between October and December (Cawley, 2004). The postings lead to a meeting of suppliers and demanders in January at the American Economic Association (AEA) meetings, when face-to-face job interviews are conducted. Academic job listings that appear in the fall are usually for jobs that begin in September of the following academic year. Nonacademic job listings may be for immediate, spring, summer or fall placement.
The JOE informational service is currently asymmetrical in the sense that demanders list job openings, but there is no comprehensive listing of job searchers. Many schools do, however, send out lists and maintain websites of their job market candidates, but because these lists and websites are neither centrally located nor searchable, they are far less useful than they otherwise would be. (2) Instead, most often, individuals send applications directly to potential employers who have listed openings in JOE. Let us now consider the individual suppliers and demanders.
I-1 The suppliers
Each year about 900 new PhDs are produced by approximately 100 schools in the U.S. (Siegfried and Stock, 2004; Cawley, 2004). In addition, a small number of foreign PhDs also enter the US market. Suppliers are often defined by characteristics such as the graduate school they attended, their dissertation advisor(s), fields of specialization, nationality, gender, etc. The majority of sellers in this market are newly minted Ph.D.'s or graduate students in the final throes of their dissertation.
I-2 The demanders
There are three primary groups that hire economists--academic institutions, non-profit enterprises, and for-profit firms. Each of these is further segmented into various groupings--in academia, there are top ranked PhD programs, mid level PhD programs, research liberal arts schools, teaching liberal arts colleges, etc. There are also business schools, medical schools, law schools and public policy schools that hire economists. Non-profit buyers include think tanks, government agencies and nongovernmental organizations while for-profit buyers include financial institutions, as well as management, economic and marketing consulting firms. (3) Jobs come on the market because of deaths, retirements, and expansions of departments and programs.
The creation of positions has its own institutional elements, and in academia, is usually dependent on how many "lines" a department has. The number of lines is loosely related to the demand for the courses taught, but it also depends enormously on institutional politics. Additional lines generally require administrative approval and are rarely, if ever, decided by departments alone. Lines can be either tenure track or non-tenure track.
II. Middlebury's Demand
Middlebury College is a highly selective private liberal arts college founded in 1800 and located in Middlebury, Vermont. It is regularly listed among the top liberal arts colleges in the nation in the US News and World Report annual survey. The College has an enrollment of approximately 2350 undergraduate students from all U.S. states and territories and 68 foreign countries (international students comprise 8.1% of the student body) and has been coeducational for well over a century. Economics is the largest major at Middlebury and the department has about sixteen full and part-time faculty members.
Middlebury entered the market because of enrollment pressures; it received an additional line because it had the highest student-faculty ratio on campus. The department has a strong tradition of both excellent teaching and strong research, and the college is generally classified as a research liberal arts school--competing with the other top tier liberal arts schools. Since our primary motivation for hiring was to reduce enrollment pressures, we chose to advertise an "any field" position. (4) There was little to no disagreement on...
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