Category: Uncategorized

It’s that time of the year again, when graduate students who are about to enter their final year in economics and related disciplines are getting ready to go on the job market.

Going on the job market is a harrowing experience for most people, however, so I thought I should help job-market candidates by sharing my advice.

This post is the first in a series of three. Today, I’d like to discuss what you should be doing the summer and fall before you go on the job market. The next installment will be posted tomorrow and will cover ASSA interviews.

If you teach a field course (e.g., international development) in a policy school or in a political science department, chances are some of your students are not quite conversant in the quantitative methods used in the social sciences.

For example, when I taught at a policy school, many of the undergraduates who signed up for my fall seminar on the Microeconomics of International Development Policy were very bright, but they were not familiar with regression analysis, and so they didn’t know how to read a regression table. This made it difficult for me to assign journal articles be discussed in a course on the microeconomics of development.

While I did not have the time to teach basic econometrics to students in those seminars, I have prepared two handouts for them to read in preparation for reading papers containing empirical results, which I thought I should make available to anyone who would rather not spend precious class time teaching the basics of quantitative methods. I have used both these handouts in my development seminar last fall, and my students said that they had learned quite a bit from reading them.

“I have studied a lot for this test, but I didn’t do well. That’s so unfair. How can I do better next time?”

This is a question I have heard often since I began teaching. Because I used to teach the core undergraduate microeconomics course in a public policy school, where not all students like economics, it is a question I have probably heard more often than my colleagues who have always taught in an economics department.

So instead of giving the same advice over and over again to different students, I thought I should write down my thoughts about how one can maximize the chances one will do well in one’s economics class.

Beyond the obvious, my credentials for doing so are as follows. I started college wanting to major in philosophy. After a few semesters of (i) wondering what I would do with my life with a philosophy degree and (ii) feeling frustrated by what I felt was somewhat arbitrary grading, I switched my focus to economics, where I didn’t do very well in microeconomics and math for economists until I figured out a good method of preparing for tests. But that wasn’t until I started my Masters in Economics.

Hopefully, this document will help some of you get there earlier than I did.