Expanding Opportunities: New Facts about the Placement of PhD Economists

Markus Eberhardt, Giovanni Facchini and Valeria Rueda

No 21710, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Is the top of the economics profession becoming more insular? We study the placement of top PhD graduates over the past quarter-century, matching them to their advisors. Three trends point towards greater openness: graduates increasingly place outside academia, outside the US, and into a tech sector recruiting broadly across gender, ethnicity, and program prestige. The disaggregated picture is less reassuring: the Emerging South is largely sidelined in the global job market, East Asians face persistent gaps in top academic placement, and elite advisors continue to confer substantial advantages within academia. Tech placement, meanwhile, is dominated by a single employer.

Keywords: Gender; Ethnicity; Diversity; Economics; Academic job market (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A11 D9 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-07
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP21710 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:21710

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP21710

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().