Initial placement --> future placement.

[currentstudent]

I'm trying to get a sense of how much people's positions move between their initial placement and where they "end up", realizing of course that people do continue to move sometimes throughout their lives, hence the quote marks.

I was looking at this paper: Atypon Link - Error

and it seemed like people's placements actually went down over time, although that could be due to just a few people moving down. For instance, it says that 42.3% of the people at school C (MIT?) start out in top-50 jobs and then later on 37.2% are in top-50 jobs, and their school A also shows a 4.3% decline in people who hold top-50 jobs over time (I'm not so interested in school B).

How do people typically move after their initial placement? A few move down as they fail to get tenure, and then the rest move up? How much up? How many move?

[unitroot]

I don't think there is a "typical" career path for anyone. After the contract at the site of initial placement expires, neither their adviser nor the school where you got PhD have any influence. Where they move afterwards depends entirely on whether they published anything good during the first 4-5 years. Certainly, there will be some people who will not keep up with the standards for obtaining a tenure at a top 50 department, and so they will move down. At the same time there will be those who got placed below top 50 and who might end up moving up. Based on what you're saying, the net average trend is actually to move down further a little, which is not that surprising.

[jeeves0923]

Keep in mind that some could move down as they get older to join a less competitive environment. Perhaps they want to live in a more rural community, or don't want to pressure of having to produce X number of publications per year. Maybe they want a quieter life and producing X/2 publications per year.

[C152dude]

Originally Posted by jeeves0923

Keep in mind that some could move down as they get older to join a less competitive environment. Perhaps they want to live in a more rural community, or don't want to pressure of having to produce X number of publications per year. Maybe they want a quieter life and producing X/2 publications per year.

If they are tenured, does the pressure exist?

[jeeves0923]

Perhaps not, but the competitive environment could produce negative externalities? I dunno... I could see a low key environment as being attractive when I was getting up in years. No evidence to back this up, however.

[C152dude]

Plausibly true. I met a Madison professor (not econ) who stated he would love to be at a small LAC and just teach.

[GymShorts]

It's not unheard of for a lower ranked school to offer a well-established researcher a higher salary to convince them to leave a higher ranked school. Plus, I wouldn't mind accepting more money and less work in exchange for leaving a more prestigious department.

[IrrationalActor]

Social Science Ph.D. Alumni

CalTech lists both the initial placement and current placement of all of their graduates from the Social Sciences PhD program.

A few notable ones:

Harvard KSG to UC Irvine

UIUC to UPenn

UCSD to Cal State Northridge

Texas A&M to NYU

Princeton to Rochester

Of course, one has to take into consideration that not everyone in CalTech's Social Science program is an economist, so placement analysis might be different for political scientists, anthropologists, etc.

[OneMoreEcon]

If you're looking for some idea of point estimates, I think the (rumor but supposedly well-documented) situation is that you should expect an initial placement at a school ranked X places below your PhD dept and tenure at a school ranked Y places below your PhD dept, with X<Y (meaning you move down for tenure, since #3 dept is better than #10 dept).

Why? Some people don't produce enough output for their initial dept, while others accept an offer from a lower-ranked school for more money or a much better environment. This also shouldn't be surprising to you, since otherwise top schools would never need to hire fresh PhDs... they'd just give tenure to previously-hired PhDs (or junior faculty that they poached from other schools)... but keep in mind that I think MIT is the only top school that didn't hire any fresh PhDs this year, and that was a rare surprise.

[asianeconomist]

I am not entirely sure, but isn't there a myth relating to your placement being at a department with a ranking of "x-50" where x = Rank of your Econ PhD granting institution.