THE MARKET FOR NEW PHD ECONOMISTS

Virtually every reader of this article has at some time experienced the vagaries of the economics job market. As job seekers, we have observed the actual functioning of the market for economists and, perhaps, questioned whether the market sorts new Ph.D. economists into academic and nonacademic positions in an efficient manner, based on individual qualifications and preferences. In this article, I use a new database of Ph.D. economists to describe the job market experiences of recent graduate students and to examine the determinants of occupational structure during the academic year 1988-89.