You lack knowledge. ... Family macro does better than the demographers who don't even know statistics.Oh yeah, when Dopke and Sillibottom wrote up anecdates about their children and that was a major contribution
lol
This one is such a good pun
What's going on at Yale?
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structural, IO, and labor extremely popular in industry and government. I don’t think that’s where Yale wants to place people though. All we do in my agency is interview structural people.
as a (not so) recent grad, I felt that Yale was living in a parallel world to the other departments, in particular the more recent students (seemed to be intensifying 4-5 years ago). Such particular choices of research topics/approaches - the hard on for methodology in IO, Geography/Spatial/tax in "macro", the structural bent in labor and Dev.
Doubling down on theory/methodological hires has not helped this AT ALL. Translates into students' works. Those tools are not as valued in the academic market as they were 10 years ago, not valued at all for non-academic/quasi-academic research roles.
tl;dr. all-in bet gone wrong. Maybe yale liked itself too much 10 years ago when they had a number of very successful candidates in different groups. Mean-reverted and took too long to realize it.
Fair enough, it's clearly not a case of structural vs reg monkeys. It's about the flavour of structural. yale goes one step too far IMO - just see what the IO 2 publish (it's not about IO being structural, ofc). Same for labour. Compare the JMP of candidates in these fields to those elsewhere. It is about the tradeoff - to spend months tweaking your structural model and getting another identification result (or matching models not many can do/understand) vs going for a simpler model, better data and using tools more adequate to larger datasets ("ML"). The default is (was) to go more traditional structural when the tradeoff appears.
I may be wrong, but I think the candidates seem every bit as polished and impressive as 5-10 years ago. Demand for their tools/approach is what I see changing.
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structural, IO, and labor extremely popular in industry and government. I don’t think that’s where Yale wants to place people though. All we do in my agency is interview structural people.
as a (not so) recent grad, I felt that Yale was living in a parallel world to the other departments, in particular the more recent students (seemed to be intensifying 4-5 years ago). Such particular choices of research topics/approaches - the hard on for methodology in IO, Geography/Spatial/tax in "macro", the structural bent in labor and Dev.
Doubling down on theory/methodological hires has not helped this AT ALL. Translates into students' works. Those tools are not as valued in the academic market as they were 10 years ago, not valued at all for non-academic/quasi-academic research roles.
tl;dr. all-in bet gone wrong. Maybe yale liked itself too much 10 years ago when they had a number of very successful candidates in different groups. Mean-reverted and took too long to realize it.
Fair enough, it's clearly not a case of structural vs reg monkeys. It's about the flavour of structural. yale goes one step too far IMO - just see what the IO 2 publish (it's not about IO being structural, ofc). Same for labour. Compare the JMP of candidates in these fields to those elsewhere. It is about the tradeoff - to spend months tweaking your structural model and getting another identification result (or matching models not many can do/understand) vs going for a simpler model, better data and using tools more adequate to larger datasets ("ML"). The default is (was) to go more traditional structural when the tradeoff appears.
I may be wrong, but I think the candidates seem every bit as polished and impressive as 5-10 years ago. Demand for their tools/approach is what I see changing.I think I agree. I don’t see much change in demand from industry and government. But I don’t think academia wants this kind of pointless modelbation (not even mathturbation). However, if you only recruit students who want to go work at census or Treasury, that’s not great candidate quality, that’s what Maryland does. I doubt that’s what Yale wants to be, but that’s what they’re becoming.
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Very good points in this thread. To summarize, I'd say that part of the old guard in the department has either retired or gotten out of touch with research in the real world. These guys will direct their students to spend 5 years working on a single paper to polish a nonparametric identification result or huge model. Add to this poor junior hires and strict tenure standards, so we have a department where most people are not in the modus operandi of the other researchers at the frontier. It turns out that the "Cowles Tradition" is not a hill you want to die on.
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Exactly. Right now Yale is decent in theory, metrics was really good but the style is dying quickly. Focuses on other fields (e.g., macro’s focus on development and geography, labor’s focus on structural matching) are so niche that there’re really sliding from the central stage very quickly
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Whenever I hear about macro's struggles at Yale, I think "they should make me an offer". I'm not sure I would take it, but I am the kind of person they need: core, high-impact macro topics, lots of influence as measured by citations and top 5s, and so on. (Obviously I can't offer more detail without outing myself.) And I would at least consider it, since it would be interesting to see what one could do with the ivy name, leveraging the Cowles (and Tobin) traditions in the right way, etc. Also, I wouldn't mind living in CT as much as a lot of my peers.
I've never gotten any hint of interest. I guess it's conceited to expect any, but it does put their macro struggles in a different light for me. I think they have both weird and elitist preferences: they want "top" people, but their definition of top is a little different from everybody else's. The few actual "top" people they go after they can't get, and then they end up with people who are only "top" according to their own unusual definition.
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Yale had had a reputation for training their PhD students well and for having a high median placement with one or two stars every year. Their placement has not been good the past couple of years. Any insider on what's going on?
Next placement will also be awful---watch out!
Any insider info on current placements?
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Yale had had a reputation for training their PhD students well and for having a high median placement with one or two stars every year. Their placement has not been good the past couple of years. Any insider on what's going on?
Next placement will also be awful---watch out!
Any insider info on current placements?
Couple of people doing well but...not that good overall.
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I wish some top department would have the courage to say out loud what most of us have realized for a long time. "Macro" is a dead field and deserves to be buried. Some of what macro should do should survive. Keep it but call it "monetary economics" or something. Forbid any current "macro economist" from being involved with it. The rest:
-- "Macro labor:" bad search theory and bad labor
-- "Family macro:" bad economic demography
-- "Macro of firms:" bad IO
-- "Growth:" bad economic history
-- "Dynamic public finance:" bad theory, bad public financeYou lack knowledge. Macro labor does better labor that reg y x wage race labor. Growth does better history than the historians with their coding errors (PG?). Dynamic public finance does better public finance that the effects of the gasoline tax on XYZ county's gas consumption. Family macro does better than the demographers who don't even know statistics.
Mic drop comment. Mods, frame and pin to front page
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The style of what they do (structural vs reduced form) is definitely not in fashion at the moment. Who knows if it'll come back.
Meanwhile a lot of the mediocre placements can be rectified by admitting more white women and less Chinese. They place harribly. The Koreans doing metrics continue to do well.
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There are issues with the match between what the department does and what kind of people the market wants. And macro has always been a problem. But when I was there (finished 1-3 years ago) a big shift in advising culture was underway.
They’re gonna lose the young good guy(s) driving that culture change though and be back at square one
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Grim
Yale had had a reputation for training their PhD students well and for having a high median placement with one or two stars every year. Their placement has not been good the past couple of years. Any insider on what's going on?
Next placement will also be awful---watch out!
Any insider info on current placements?
-
There are issues with the match between what the department does and what kind of people the market wants. And macro has always been a problem. But when I was there (finished 1-3 years ago) a big shift in advising culture was underway.
They’re gonna lose the young good guy(s) driving that culture change though and be back at square one
From what I saw (finished 2 years ago) it was a change for the worse. They now have people who care more about their social media than advising.
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I wish some top department would have the courage to say out loud what most of us have realized for a long time. "Macro" is a dead field and deserves to be buried. Some of what macro should do should survive. Keep it but call it "monetary economics" or something. Forbid any current "macro economist" from being involved with it. The rest:
-- "Macro labor:" bad search theory and bad labor
-- "Family macro:" bad economic demography
-- "Macro of firms:" bad IO
-- "Growth:" bad economic history
-- "Dynamic public finance:" bad theory, bad public financeYou lack knowledge. Macro labor does better labor that reg y x wage race labor. Growth does better history than the historians with their coding errors (PG?). Dynamic public finance does better public finance that the effects of the gasoline tax on XYZ county's gas consumption. Family macro does better than the demographers who don't even know statistics.
Mic drop comment. Mods, frame and pin to front page
As one of the dumbest posts ever on EJMR?
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There are issues with the match between what the department does and what kind of people the market wants. And macro has always been a problem. But when I was there (finished 1-3 years ago) a big shift in advising culture was underway.
They’re gonna lose the young good guy(s) driving that culture change though and be back at square one
From what I saw (finished 2 years ago) it was a change for the worse. They now have people who care more about their social media than advising.
Who besides Pande and Moborak?
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I hope Yale doubles down in their structural theory approach. It's the right way to many people and a viable differentiation strategy in a hellscape of low IQ regmonkeys who should be in sociology making 60k.
Unfortunately most junior faculty recruiting committees do not share the same view