An Empirical Guide to Hiring Assistant Professors in Economics

We study the research productivity of new graduates of top Ph.D. programs in economics. We find that class rank is as important as departmental rank in predicting future research productivity. For example the best graduate from UIUC or Toronto in a given year will have roughly the same number of American Economic Review (AER) equivalent publications at year six after graduation as the number three graduate from Berkeley, U. Penn or Yale. We also find that research productivity of graduates drops off very quickly with class rank at all departments. For example, even at Harvard, the median graduate has only 0.04 AER papers at year six, an untenurable record at almost any department. These results provide guidance on how much weight to give to place of graduation relative to class standing when hiring new assistant professors. They also suggest that even the top departments are not doing a very good job at training the great majority of their students to be successful research economists