Doing Economics

Help students keep things in perspective. By virtue of being more senior
in the profession, you can help students keep things in perspective.
Graduate students going through coursework tend to think their entire
career is doomed if they do not do well in their courses or if they fail their
qualifying exams. Your role is to help them see that some of the best-known
scholars have also struggled through coursework, and that there is little to
no correlation between the ability to take tests and the ability to come up
with (and do a good job answering) interesting research questions.
Likewise, students on the job market tend to think their time in graduate
school was wasted if they do not get the offers they wanted. Your role is to
help them see that even if they do not land their ideal position, the
investment they have made in their education practically guarantees that
they will always have a job that pays well, or in a location of their choice if
they are flexible about the industry they choose to work in.
When is a PhD student’s dissertation prospectus ready to be defended? In
many departments, students have to present and defend their dissertation
prospectus before they can have all of their requirements completed save
their dissertation (i.e., ABD, for all but dissertation status). Given that
three-paper (instead of monograph-type) dissertations are now the norm in
economics, the broad standard I have witnessed over the years is that a
student is ready for ABD status when they have (i) a first paper that is ready
to be circulated as a working paper and presented at conferences, (ii) some
rough results for a second paper that is usually missing only robustness
checks and extensions, and (iii) a collection of bullet points outlining what
they plan on doing in their third paper. This strikes me as a reasonable norm
in that it allows students to use their second-year paper (if applicable) as
that first paper, a term paper for a field class as their second paper, and an
idea that may or may not come to fruition as their third paper. Equally
importantly, this allows a student’s advisor or committee to correct the
student’s course early on.
The best PhD dissertations consist of three essays on a coherent theme.
By “best dissertations,” I mean those that will best prepare a student to
make a contribution in a given area of research as well as those that are
most likely to win awards. Indeed, three essays on a coherent theme allows
a student to demonstrate both the depth and breadth of their research. It
allows a student to demonstrate depth by virtue of having them explore a
given topic or theme in more detail. But it also allows them to demonstrate

---

breadth by exploring that topic or theme from different angles. The best
dissertation I supervised consisted of three essays on price volatility; two of
those were experimental papers, and the third was observational and
included a fair bit of theoretical modeling.
The essays in a dissertation will typically be of unequal quality. Many
dissertations consist of an excellent first paper (usually the student’s job
market paper), a paper that shows promise, and a third paper that has been
put together rapidly in order to graduate soon after the student has received
a job offer. Even for students headed toward an academic career, that is
fine, as it gives them three papers they can submit within their first two
years on the tenure track. Even with the best students, expecting three
papers of the same quality may be unrealistic.
When is a master’s student’s thesis ready to be defended? A few rules of
thumb apply when comparing a PhD dissertation and a master’s thesis.
First, whereas a PhD dissertation tends to consist of three essays, a master’s
thesis tends to consist of one essay. Second, it is generally acceptable for a
master’s thesis to consist of an essay replicating someone else’s work using
a different data set, but one would likely have a hard time defending a
dissertation that consists of three such essays. Third, the level of technique
that can be expected from a master’s student is strictly less than what can be
expected of a PhD student. Broadly speaking, it helps to think of the goal of
a master’s degree to be to bring students to the research frontier, and to
think of the goal of a PhD to have students push that research frontier
further.