A Seller's (& Buyer's) Guide to the Job Market for Beginning Academic Economists

In the past, Ernst Stromsdorfer has circulated a questionnaire to members of the AEA chairpersons' group which has focused on some aspects of the market outcome, but our survey focuses primarily on the process itself. Our ECON20 sample was determined by taking a composite of recent rankings (e.g., Laband, 1985). The departments included: Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Michigan, Minnesota, NYU, Northwestern, Pennsylvania, Princeton, Rochester, Rutgers, Stanford, UC-Berkeley, UC-Los Angeles, UC-San Diego, Wisconsin, Yale. Our use of 20 schools was somewhat, but not totally, arbitrary: the data indicated that defining an ECON25 or perhaps an ECON30 group would not have significantly changed the results, but the data did not support going beyond that point. Our sample was drawn from 992 economics departments listed in the 1985 American Economics Association Handbook. All economics departments ranked in the ECON20 stratum were sampled and, free rider problems notwithstanding, all responded. 380 departments in the ECONOTHER stratum were sent surveys and 53 percent of those responded. All but one of the ECON20 departments had one or more job openings while a much lower percent (51 percent) of the 20 ECONOTHER departments which responded had one or more job openings.