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Originally Posted by hereshoping
How does co-authoring papers with other faculty members factor into your attractiveness as a job market candidate? My impression is that your job market paper should be your individual work, but it is acceptable for you to do some collaborative work with faculty as well.
So it seems that in addition to the time you spend on your job market paper, you can allocate your research time in 2 ways: 1) you could work with a reputable faculty member in your department and attempt to get a paper published with them before you get on the job market, or 2) you could get other independent projects going so that they are 'in the works' when you are on the market. What are your guys' opinions of the tradeoffs between these 2?
Also, I've seen a lot of dissertations that are actually a collection of seperate papers (i.e. 3 essays on a related set of topics). Do people who do this write all these papers individually, or are some co-authored pieces with their advisors?
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It will definitely help in terms of your letters of recommendation. Your job market paper should be your own, though. (e.g. this year, Pierre Yared wrote several papers with Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, but his job market paper was single authored.)
Most dissertations nowadays in economics are three papers that are loosely related. They need not be single authored.
Regarding your two options, if this is indeed the choice faced, I would probably write papers with a respected faculty member. Why not have some papers published and some papers "in the works" with them? (or without them?) Your attention does not need to be focused on one or two projects, though. As others have pointed out, it does not have to take an entire three years to write three papers, and it definitely does not have to take three years to get three ideas "in the works."