Yale placement (e-mail from department)

[LagrangeJames]

For the sake of perfect information...

 

+++++++++++++

 

 

A message from Yale Economics Placement Office

 

Dear Prospective Students,

 

It was a pleasure to meet most of you last week here and to present to you our

activities in macroeconomics and our placement. For those of you who were not

here, I have been running placement this past year with Kareen Rozen and Pam

O'Donnell. Last week-end I showed everybody who was here our placement outcomes

for 2009. Now the outcomes are posted at:

 

Recent Placement Outcomes

 

 

All our candidates are listed, with one exception, who has an offer from

UC San Diego Economics and is still pondering other possibilities. As

this excellent outcome and the posted list show, this was a banner year

for us in placement. We usually place well, around the same level, but this year was of

course particularly difficult given the state of the job market, the many

cancelled searches, etc. Most of our students had multiple, very competitive

offers, you only see the accepted ones there. 16 out of 18 will have tenure

track jobs at visible to top institutions, one is going to the BEA research

dept which is similar to a FED, and one is going to a private sector fund,

where some of his work will involve academic-type research.

 

I am writing, before you make a final decision, to make sure you are fully

informed and to dispel some false information that seems to be flying

around about our placement. In fact, I would be very much obliged if you

could help us "spread the truth." We enjoy healthy competition, and since

we do so well we have an even stronger interest in transparency.

 

As I said in my presentation here, as far as I know we are THE ONLY Economics

Department in the world to publish PhD placement outcomes of ALL students on

the market, with fields, going back 10+ years. If you know of any other

Dept. that does that, please let me know. It seems to be the norm elsewhere to leak

selected placement outcomes.

 

In the three years I have been running placement, out of 43 candidates who

went to the AEA meetings and beyond, only one had to accept a temporary one-year

(academic) position. Of the other 42, including this year, two went to

private sector jobs (that they like :-), one went to the FED Board, one works for the

SEC (his dream job, as he also got a Law Degree here), one as said will joint

the BEA, the other 36 have academic jobs at well-known schools. The

postdocs listed are either prestigious multi-year positions, with same money and less

teaching, that were preferred over tenure track job offers (one this year and

one last year), or one-year positions preceding the start of the tenure track

at top 10 places (who can afford giving their new hires the first year off on a

postdoc). Just to be totally transparent.

 

As our students can witness, we spend a vast amount of human and financial

resources on training PhD students for the job market. For example, we are

one of the very few places (the only one?) to assign two, sometimes even

three (myself, Peter Phillips and Bill Nordhaus three years ago) full time

faculty to this task. Recommendation letters go out timely and orderly,

our staff are on top of everything. We work hard to match candidates to

the appropriate jobs, I myself work on job matching and job search in my

research so I know what I am talking about. Last year we started hiring,

at significant cost, a speaking consultancy firm to train our candidates

in their presentations. We constantly strive to improve, and we run this

training as professionally as it deserves. Ultimately, your fate depends

mostly on the quality of your research, but no detail is left to chance

here. It is not for me to judge how well we do this job. Beyond the

placement outcomes, I can only relate the objective information that many

colleagues elsewhere are struck by how well Yale candidates are prepared.

 

Thank you all, I hope you will join us

 

Giuseppe

 

 

Giuseppe Moscarini Yale University

Professor of Economics Department of Economics

tel (203) 432-3596 P.O. Box 208268

fax (203) 436-2626 New Haven CT 06520-8268

Giuseppe Moscarini

[bheld]

Yale had an amazing year.

 

The question is who are these people that still have outstanding offers?

[Nalfien]

The question is who are these people that still have outstanding offers?

 

What do you mean?

[Aumann]

Yale had an amazing year.

 

The question is who are these people that still have outstanding offers?

 

Probably people waiting to see if they got the Nsf and got into MIT or the like.

[bheld]

What do you mean?

 

I mean that you'd have to be in a pretty good position to be sitting on an offer from Yale for any significant amount of time.

[SF_Haole]

As I said in my presentation here, as far as I know we are THE ONLY Economics Department in the world to publish PhD placement outcomes of ALL students on the market, with fields, going back 10+ years. If you know of any other Dept. that does that, please let me know.

 

They're not published on the department's website, but Michigan handed out their past decade of placement results in hard copy during the flyout. The results weren't quite Yale-esque but they claimed, proudly, to have placed every single job market candidate into a research position for the last ten years.

[Nalfien]

They're not published on the department's website, but Michigan handed out their past decade of placement results in hard copy during the flyout. The results weren't quite Yale-esque but they claimed, proudly, to have placed every single job market candidate into a research position for the last ten years.

 

Most schools will give out their list when you are admitted but Yale keeps it open to the public which is kind of what he's talking about.

[jbs02002]

As far as I know, Minnesota's complete placement record is publicly available. The website is here:

 

University of Minnesota Department of Economics

 

Obviously they are not as good as Yale's but the public record goes back more than 10 years.

[pevdoki1]

As far as I know, Minnesota's complete placement record is publicly available. The website is here:

 

University of Minnesota Department of Economics

 

Obviously they are not as good as Yale's but the public record goes back more than 10 years.

 

I find it hard to believe that not a single person had a private sector placement in those 10 years, but I suppose it's possible.

 

I guess we should be able to compare this year's job market candidates page to 2008-2009 placements that will be posted.

[Nalfien]

I find it hard to believe that not a single person had a private sector placement in those 10 years, but I suppose it's possible.

 

Good catch.

 

They say:

 

Others of our graduates were employed by state or federal government agencies in the U. S. and other countries, the Federal Reserve System, international organizations, private consulting firms, and other private-sector firms.

 

But they don't list them

 

Edit: Apparently they do. See next post.

[jbs02002]

I find it hard to believe that not a single person had a private sector placement in those 10 years, but I suppose it's possible.

 

I see an ERS Group placement in 2004-2005, Microstrategy, Inc. and Brattle Group in 1999-2000, Brattle and CNA Corp. in 1998-1999, Price Waterhouse and Oppenheimer Funds in 1997-1998, and a few more further back. I think UMN may place few people in the private sector because most of us focus on macro-related stuff and do very little metrics (especially a while ago). This doesn't mesh with private sector work, which tends to be micro and/or metrics related. Econ consulting firms for example generally only hire finance/IO/applied micro/metrics guys.