Congrats on passing your first year. Some off-the-cuff thoughts from someone still trying to get to where you are and spent a lot of thing on EconTwitter figuring stuff out:
I read online that 2nd econ phd year is usually the best year. Field courses I hear are a treat. If you’re not feeling that year, it’s unlikely the rest of the academic path will sustain your interest.
I think year 3 is where you can possibly have your first test bet, since it’s the first solo year. I also hear it’s the easiest to slack off in. A recurring joke I’ve seen among faculty tweets is “we still don’t know what our students do in their 3rd year, but we know it takes them a year”
I recall a Twitter poll that listed econ PhD year 1 as the highest work hours per week (compared to 2nd year, 3rd year, 4/5th year, job market year, tenure track, tenured). If the 5 days on 2 days off is what you miss, I suspect you’ll swing partly back towards that, which may help.
The wealth of peers with similar interests is a big reason why I’d considering PhDs. I do think you’ll have trouble finding that outside the PhD. That said, you’ll still have those connections and if EconTwitter doesn’t blow up, you can have that as kinda surrogate connection feeling.
I’d separate working on treatment spillovers and growth. Treatment spillovers feels like a measurement and impact evaluation thing, which does seem very academic-research-loaded. But growth is the outcome and working on growth can mean many things (which is one of my frustrations when people say we should work on economic growth. It as specific as saying you want to work on non-global-health systemic change).
In the real world, very few roles work on growth theory or policies for aggregate growth directly. It’s usually some piece, like infrastructure or corruption or business liberalization or so forth. Some might have a growth model as their motivation, but for most people the motivation is as simple as “this is a big problem with big upside, let’s work on it”. If that more growth-adjacent less-evaluation-rigor stuff appeals to you, the PhD is less crucial.
As an aside, to my knowledge, most trade econ doesn’t work on country-level growth directly or stuff relating to that. That seems to result from the history of trade methodology, where it’s very micro focused. There is stuff on firm productivity growth in the “new new trade theory” (look up Melitz) though it’s unclear how that aggregates up into broader welfare gains. I do know there’s a macro-trade / computable trade niche of stuff going on, but I’m less familiar with those, and that community feels like it’s closer to macro than trade.
Thanks for all the helpful thoughts. The distinction between the growth work and treatment spillovers is useful. Growth theory doesn’t seem to be a huge field these days, whereas program evaluation is quite large.
Congrats on passing your first year. Some off-the-cuff thoughts from someone still trying to get to where you are and spent a lot of thing on EconTwitter figuring stuff out:
I read online that 2nd econ phd year is usually the best year. Field courses I hear are a treat. If you’re not feeling that year, it’s unlikely the rest of the academic path will sustain your interest.
I think year 3 is where you can possibly have your first test bet, since it’s the first solo year. I also hear it’s the easiest to slack off in. A recurring joke I’ve seen among faculty tweets is “we still don’t know what our students do in their 3rd year, but we know it takes them a year”
I recall a Twitter poll that listed econ PhD year 1 as the highest work hours per week (compared to 2nd year, 3rd year, 4/5th year, job market year, tenure track, tenured). If the 5 days on 2 days off is what you miss, I suspect you’ll swing partly back towards that, which may help.
The wealth of peers with similar interests is a big reason why I’d considering PhDs. I do think you’ll have trouble finding that outside the PhD. That said, you’ll still have those connections and if EconTwitter doesn’t blow up, you can have that as kinda surrogate connection feeling.
I’d separate working on treatment spillovers and growth. Treatment spillovers feels like a measurement and impact evaluation thing, which does seem very academic-research-loaded. But growth is the outcome and working on growth can mean many things (which is one of my frustrations when people say we should work on economic growth. It as specific as saying you want to work on non-global-health systemic change).
In the real world, very few roles work on growth theory or policies for aggregate growth directly. It’s usually some piece, like infrastructure or corruption or business liberalization or so forth. Some might have a growth model as their motivation, but for most people the motivation is as simple as “this is a big problem with big upside, let’s work on it”. If that more growth-adjacent less-evaluation-rigor stuff appeals to you, the PhD is less crucial.
As an aside, to my knowledge, most trade econ doesn’t work on country-level growth directly or stuff relating to that. That seems to result from the history of trade methodology, where it’s very micro focused. There is stuff on firm productivity growth in the “new new trade theory” (look up Melitz) though it’s unclear how that aggregates up into broader welfare gains. I do know there’s a macro-trade / computable trade niche of stuff going on, but I’m less familiar with those, and that community feels like it’s closer to macro than trade.
Thanks for all the helpful thoughts. The distinction between the growth work and treatment spillovers is useful. Growth theory doesn’t seem to be a huge field these days, whereas program evaluation is quite large.