Doing Economics

Different students respond differently to the same incentives. Some
students thrive in a program where they are surrounded by people who are
smarter than they are. Others thrive when they are top dog and are
empowered by feeling like they are the smartest person in the room.
Similarly, some students thrive when they only have limited time for
research (say, because they have to teach in exchange for funding), whereas
others do better when they have long periods of unencumbered time they
can dedicate to research. Helping each student figure out their “type” can
help them do better, and it will help tailor your advising to their needs.
Graduate students should avoid consulting. One exception to the
previous rule is that graduate students should avoid (and advisors should
avoid roping their graduate students into) consulting like the plague, both

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because of the immediate opportunity cost (time spent consulting is time
not spent working on one’s research), and because a little bit of consulting
is a gateway drug to more consulting. Some graduate programs in the
Washington, DC area are notorious for their low completion rates, and the
reason that is often cited is proximity to US government agencies,
multilateral institutions (e.g., World Bank, International Monetary Fund),
and beltway bandits (i.e., consulting firms that derive most or all of their
business from government contracts), which leads to graduate students
realizing that they can make a lot more money by consulting than what their
graduate student stipend brings in. This is not bad in and of itself when
done in moderation, but the temptation to make even more money by
consulting can lead to not finishing one’s degree, or taking a long time to do
so. The obvious (and rare) exception is when consulting activities directly
align with one’s research and can generate publications. Unfortunately,
most graduate students are not yet known for being experts on anything,
and so it is rare that they get consulting opportunities that can feed into their
research, and cobbling a thesis or dissertation from consulting deliverables
tends to make for a thesis or dissertation that lacks coherence, which limits
the work’s publication potential.
Grad school is a time for focusing. People who select into going to
graduate school often have wide-ranging interests and, as a result, are often
interested in a wide range of economic questions—if not of fields. To put it
like Hamermesh (2011) did in his advice to junior faculty, a graduate
student should “become an expert on 1.5 topics.” Early on in his studies,
one of my former PhD students would fall in love with the topic of every
seminar, and he would start reading on a new topic virtually every week
until I sat him down and explained to him that the market for dilettantes
was rather thin. That student has since then become an expert on roughly
one and a half topics.
You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink. Some
students will see their time in grad school as a time to learn as much as
possible, including from the feedback they receive from their advisor.
Others will seem to pick and choose which pieces of feedback they
incorporate. Yet others will be very reticent to incorporating any feedback
they receive. In my experience, the students who approach graduate school
with humility and treat it as an opportunity to learn as much as possible are

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the ones who end up being the most successful—in graduate school, on the
job market, and in their career.
Be on the lookout for your advisees’ mental well-being. A recent article
in Nature Biotechnology (Evans et al. 2018) begins by noting that 6 percent
of the general population rated as moderate to severe on the depression
scale. Surveying over 2,200 graduate students (90 percent PhD students and
10 percent master’s students), the authors found that the proportion of
respondents who rated as moderate to severe on the depression scale attains
39 percent—a staggering six and a half times the proportion of people from
the general population. Whether that is due to selection or treatment effects
is irrelevant, but knowing how toxic the culture in the economics profession
and in some programs can get, it is likely that things are even worse in
economics. You are obviously not your advisees’ therapist, but much like
you would tell an advisee exhibiting signs of physical illness to go see a
doctor, you should be on the lookout for signals of mental illness, and refer
them to your institution’s counseling and psychological services if you feel
it is necessary. This is especially important for first-generation students
(i.e., students whose parents may not have gone to college, let alone
graduate school, and for whom graduate school is entirely uncharted
territory) and for foreign students, who may hail from cultures where
admitting to mental illness is seen as a moral failure.