Economics Ph.D. in four years

[asquare]

Only one of the essays is the "job market paper." The other two are part of the dissertation, but are not sent to schools you apply two (and probably aren't finished by the time you do applications and interviews).

Just how related the three papers are varies across students. What you are describing doesn't sound inconceivable to me. There are economies of scale in using the same data for all three chapters, of course.

[ptm]

A resource guy at Calgary told me that their model was the three-paper dissertation in four years. I don't know if this was department-wide, just for resource folks, or what.

[lyos]

In general, what are the specs like for those who finish in 4 years and get a good academic job.
Do they have one exceptional paper or do they have comparable research in terms of quality and quantity to those who finish in 5 years but just do it faster?