PhD Job Market Information for Candidates

Job Market Information for PhD Students

Important Deadlines/Timeline

Wednesday 12 October 2005: Job market orientation meeting for prospective job market candidates:

Venue: STICERD Conference Room, R505.
Time: 2.30pm.

Wednesday 19 October 2005: Let Maitreesh Ghatak and Mark Wilbor know your final decision as to whether you are ready to go on the job market. Attach your CV in the format that has been provided in the attached template.

CV Template pdf file For word document of this file, please contact Mark Wilbor.

Friday 21 October:

Email Mark Wilbor (m.s.wilbor@lse.ac.uk) with an electronic copy of your CV and THE PDF FILE OF YOUR JOB MARKET PAPER (a revised version can be sent later and the website updated). Also, please provide the following information for the standardized individual websites that Mark will create for you.
- Name:
- Advisor:
- Primary Fields:
- Secondary Fields:
- References:
- Job Market Paper:
- Abstract:
- Office:
- Home:
Copy this email to Maitreesh Ghatak. The department will mass mail all job market CVs to a list of academic and non-academic institutions. Mark Wilbor will provide an excel spreadsheet containing the addresses of these institutions. It is a good starting point if you wish to focus on particular places to make a formal application.
Present your job market paper in a seminar or lunch workshop.

Monday 24 October:

Mail your packets to US schools. Deadlines vary.
All this information is available on the JOE website.
Mark Wilbor can provide you with a mail merge document, but you will have to amend the excel spreadsheet to include only those institutions you wish to target. It will then be possible to generate cover letters which incorporate the address of each institution. Alternatively, it is possible to create address labels. You should also provide this file to your letter writers.

End of October: Faculty meeting to discuss LSE job market candidates.

November - December: Schools will start to contact you to set up interviews.

Thursday 1 December: Mock interviews with LSE faculty members and tips for job market presentations.

6 - 8 January 2006: AEA/ASSA meetings in Boston.

Second week of January - March: Job talks.

Important Websites

For JOE (Job Openings for Economists) go to http://www.aeaweb.org/joe/. Then follow the 'Recent Listings' link.

All information, including registration and hotel reservation is available at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AEA/anmt.htm

Guides to The Job Market

Comprehensive Guide to the US Job Market:

A Guide (and Advice) for Economists on the U. S. Junior Academic Job Market, by John Cawley, September 2004. It is featured on the JOE website: http://www.aeaweb.org/joe/

This gives you step by step instructions as to what to discuss with your advisor, what to put in your job packet, how to prepare for the interviews, how much wine you should drink during a post job-talk dinner....

It does pay to know the best in business are preparing, so take a look at the tips that are given to Harvard PhD students on the job market.

Another (shorter) guide is:

Job Market Tips, by Mike Conlin and Stacy Dickert

The following article talks about some aggregate statistics regarding the US Economics Job Market:

Siegfried, John J. and Wendy A. Stock, The Market for New Ph.D. Economists in 2002 pdf file , January 2004.

How to prepare for your job talk:

The "Big 5" and Other Ideas for Presentations pdf file by Donald Cox (Version: September 2000)

A guide prepared specifically for UK PhD students on the US market, and the European market is:

Getting a Job: Tips for Oxford DPhil Graduates pdf file by Brett House, Sharada Weir, and Marcel Fafchamps (Version: June 2002). It is available on Marcel Fafchamp's website: http://www.econ.ox.ac.uk/members/marcel.fafchamps/homepage/

Rankings of US and International Economics Departments

UK RAE Rankings: http://www.hero.ac.uk/rae/

Tom Coupe's Ranking of Worldwide Economics Departments: http://student.ulb.ac.be/~tcoupe/ranking.html

Ranking of US Departments by the University of Connecticut: http://edirc.repec.org/usa-top.html

Marcel Fafchamp's website has some other rankings: http://www.econ.ox.ac.uk/members/marcel.fafchamps/homepage/

The Placement Officer's Role

(Other than organizing this meeting, the mock interviews, and signing the departmental cover letters)

Respond to potential employers looking for candidates in specific fields
The goal is to place each one of you with the best match. (Ideally I would like to place all of you at Harvard, MIT and Chicago...). LSE has traditionally done very well in placing its top students in top 20 places in the US. Last year, our students had tenure-track job offers from Wisconsin-Madison, Pittsburgh, Brown, Columbia Business School, UC Davis, Carols III Madrid, Toronto, Namur, York and Bocconi. We should continue our effort to do better in places which are below top 20 but still pretty good (e.g., BU, Penn State, Iowa, Maryland, USC, Vanderbilt).
Answer questions to which obvious answers are not available in the internet resources that have been mentioned.
Remind you of obvious deadlines.
Forward you job vacancy ads from European, UK institutions, as well as non-academic jobs.
I will not typically be able to tell you if your paper is good enough, especially if it is outside my fields of expertise. It is your advisor's job, and that of other members of the thesis committee.

Your Role

I would like to make the process as less bureaucratic as possible at my end. If you have any questions, suggestions (e.g., the issue about whether to put language skills in your CV) or other information, feel free to contact me and I will try to implement these.
While at some level you are competing against each other, given the vastness of the market and the differences in your thesis topics, effectively this effect is zero. Therefore I encourage you to be cooperative with one another - for example, if you find out something about US visa application procedures let Maitreesh Ghatak know or just email the whole group.

The Non US (UK and Europe) Job Market

Not very organized and in transition.

Most action does not start before January, so for now you can focus mainly on the US market.

There are exceptions. For example, Essex are doing it according to the US Calendar. The same for IIES, Stockholm University. I will forward these to you as they come along.

Useful Websites (I have not checked all of these):

Last updated: 21/09/2004