Doing Economics

Sometimes, tough love is necessary. I have served as graduate placement
officer for our department for a number of years on and off. A few years
ago when we were hiring, one of our recent alums who happened to be on
sabbatical in our department that year decided to apply for the job we were
hiring for, and we decided to give them a first-round interview. When they
failed to make our short list, they wanted to meet with the members of the
search committee (which included me) to figure out why they had not been
invited to give a job talk. I had to tell them that we had received several
applications from candidates who had publications (often more than one) in
top field and top general journals, and that the candidate’s lack of
publications after being out three or four years did not compare well.
Generally, there is no use sugarcoating. As I have mentioned above,
people’s mistaken perceptions tend to compound and become further and
further removed from objective reality over time, and sometimes being a
good advisor means having to be the bearer of bad news.

---

Perfect is the enemy of good. A good thesis or dissertation is a finished
thesis or dissertation. Though most people who select into going to graduate
school aim for excellence, one thing that too many graduate students fail to
realize is that their thesis or dissertation is unlikely to be read by more than
a dozen people: members of their committee will (hopefully) read it, as will
the members of whatever awards committee it is sent to, and (maybe) other
grad students writing literature reviews on the same topic. As a result, one
should stop polishing one’s thesis or dissertation when it is deemed good
enough by one’s committee, which means that one should develop a certain
tolerance for imperfection. For PhD students, one has to know when a
dissertation is “good enough,” and defer polishing in view of submitting to
journals to the summer (and maybe the first few semesters) after
graduating. At any rate, dissertation papers often undergo radical
transformations on the way to getting published.
When is a PhD dissertation ready to be defended? Barring a student
needing to defend because your institution sets a specific time limit on
doctoral programs, a student is ready to defend her dissertation when she
has a job offer in hand. No economist worth his salt thinks he knows better
than the market does.
Avoid the temptation to oversell students, but also avoid having to write
letters of recommendation that are not positive. After spending three, four,
five years advising a student, you likely want them to be successful or, at
the very least, get them out of your hair. It can thus be very tempting when
writing letters of recommendation to oversell them, and make it seem as
though they are better than they really are. Overselling a student is likely to
work once or twice, but once the jig is up and people know that your word
is not to be trusted, your recommendations will not be worth much. As a
result, it behooves you to be honest about a student’s strengths and
weaknesses, and to give the readers of your letters of recommendation an
accurate read on where you see the student being successful. If, however,
you do not feel as though you can write a good letter of recommendation
for one of your advisees, let them know so that they can get the best
possible letters for themselves.
When should you coauthor with students? In some graduate programs,
faculty have a sink-or-swim attitude toward graduate students and avoid
coauthoring with anyone but the most promising students. Yet if you see

---

your role as advisor as helping students make the transition from students to
scholars, then you should think about coauthoring with your students. By
that, I do not mean that you should coauthor with your students no matter
what, but you should certainly do so in those frequent cases where there is a
double coincidence of research interests. That being said, you do not
deserve to be a de facto coauthor on every one of your students’ papers
simply by virtue of having advised them.
The advisor–advisee relationship does not end at graduation. In my third
year in grad school, I recall excitedly telling one of my econometrics
instructors, whose advisor had been Bill Greene, about a new textbook by
some guy named Wooldridge that seemed so much better to me than
Greene’s textbook. My instructor made me understand that advisor–advisee
relationships die hard, and do not end at graduation. Much like your child
will never stop being your child, no matter how old you both get, you will
remain your student’s advisor once they graduate, and they are likely to turn
to you for advice when they come across situations they are uncertain
about. Embrace the fact that, after you are done being their advisor, you are
likely to become one of their mentors.
Warn your advisees against the often toxic culture of the discipline, and
support them when they encounter it. Experimental evidence has shown that
people tend to favor people in their group, and discriminate against people
outside of their group (Abbink and Harris 2019). And on the basis of casual
empiricism as an observer of US social and political life over the last few
decades, I would speculate that when members of a group that has
traditionally been at the top of a hierarchy see their hierarchical position
threatened by members outside their group, in-group members react by
discriminating (if not by retaliating) against members of the out-group,
making life difficult for the latter. Worse: when in-group members’
reflexive discrimination or retaliation is combined with the veil of
anonymity provided by the Internet, the culture gets even more toxic, which
can make life downright unbearable for members of the out-group. Media
accounts of the discrimination experienced by women and minorities in
economics certainly support that conjecture (Parramore 2020, Rosalsky
2020, Wolfers 2017). Given that, it is no surprise that economics has a
pipeline problem (Buckles 2019, Corban and Ryssdal 2020, Hughes 2021),
wherein women and underrepresented minorities either opt out of the
profession after their studies or never elect to study economics to begin

---

with. As advisor, your job is to make your students realize the toxic nature
of the discipline, to support those who are vulnerable to it, and to educate
those who are not as to the realities of their privilege and about what they
can do to be a part of the solution.