Sorting and Staying: Economics PhDs and Their Hiring and Separation From More Teaching-Oriented Universities

Abstract

Hiring new faculty members is a time-consuming and arduous process, especially for smaller, teaching-oriented schools with limited resources. Access to information on graduate programs and candidates that are more likely to yield successful hires would allow these programs to allocate scarce resources more efficiently. We examine economists’ paths from graduate schools to these teaching-oriented schools. We use a dataset of over 650 economics PhD placements from 2003–2022 at schools that do not have a PhD program in economics to better understand hiring at these schools. We find that new assistant professors in teaching-oriented economics departments are hired from economics PhD-granting institutions with a mean U.S. News & World Report ranking of around 45. In addition, there is a positive relationship between the rank of the hiring department and the PhD-granting program. We show that top-ranked graduate programs in economics sent a smaller proportion of their graduates to teaching-oriented institutions and that the average rank of the graduate school of new PhD hires has declined over time, likely due to competition from industry. We show that hires from top seven schools are more likely to leave their position and less likely to stay at national universities relative to peers hired from lower-ranked PhD programs.