written by Anastasia Sharova
According to our study last year, 35% of economists are working outside their home countries. The majority of economists go to work to the US, Germany and France (11% of the respondents respectively), followed by Switzerland (8%), Italy, Netherlands and the UK (6% respectively).
These findings are based on the responses of 355 economists from 68 countries. You can see the details of the sample group here.
To help us follow the trend in 2013 please take part in this survey.
written by Anastasia Sharova
* The original article was published in the INOMICS Customer Newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
Are academics too smart and busy to become active participants in the share-and-like race on social media platforms? To answer this question exactly one year ago we surveyed 340 economists who visited the INOMICS platform. The majority of economists who responded to the survey (87%) were employed in Universities, Research Institutes/Think Tanks or Government. Given the global nature of internet space and keeping in mind that the use of the social media platforms may vary from country to country, we ensured a fair representation of all regions among the respondents, with 63% of respondents still being based in Europe.
written by Helen Burbank
Yesterday, the 19th of Feb, the economics community lost another famed scholar – Armen Alchian, 98, professor emeritus at the University of California Los Angeles.
Known by colleagues as “the Armenian Adam Smith,” Dr. Alchian was a fixture at UCLA, the department he joined in 1946. He spent the entirety of his academic career at UCLA, remaining on active staff until 1984, when he took up his place as a professor emeritus. According to the UCLA Obituary, he kept his office on the campus open to students until 2007. In addition to his work at UCLA he was also affiliated with RAND Corporation, was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1978) and a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economics Association (1996).
Dr. Alchian was best known as a price theorist, especially for his work in employer-employee relations. His most famous work is his coauthored 1964 Textbook Exchange and Production. It is in this publication that Alchian explains the “Alchian-Allen Effect” or Theorem; an effect explained as the result of “when a fixed cost is added to substitute goods, the more expensive one becomes relatively less expensive, and so people are likely to increase consumption of the higher quality good.” This theory has also come to be known as the ‘Third Law of Demand.” Read more
written by Anastasia Sharova
Image Credit: Liz Fosslien
Have you ever considered dating an economist, and if yes, what did you decide? If you are puzzled by this question, there are plenty of resources, which can help you to find an answer. The amount of material on this topic found by searching Google and the number of jokes made clearly indicate that it is indeed a hot topic, even more so on a Valentine’s Day.
Some articles, like 21 Reasons Why You Should Never Date an Economist by INSEAD, give quite an explicit answer. Others take a more scientific approach, but still agree on one thing: if you are dealing with a dilemma as to whether you should go for an economist or not, you should be prepared that an economist will be very unlikely to resist a temptation to apply professionally learned principles to their love life, too. Surprisingly for some, many of their assumptions might turn out true. Read more
written by Max Berre (Guest Blogger)
Google’s California headquarters is one of the more unusual places where you might find economists hard at work. While economists did not have a place at Google when it launched in 1998, by 2002 Google had begun to hire economists in advisory roles as the demand for Google’s ad space grew in size and complexity.
In 2009 Wired.com, an IT magazine which frequently covers the inner workings of Silicon Valley, published an article on ‘Googlenomics’ or the Economics of Google, a concept pioneered by U.C. Berkeley professor Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist.
Varian, has built his career by adapting and translating widely understood mainstream economics concepts for use in Google’s daily operations. He initially joined Google as a consultant in 2002. In 2010, Varian delivered one of the keynote lectures at the American Economics Association’s annual meeting, in which he spoke about the parallels between Henry Ford era assembly-line optimization and the data processing optimization that underlies most of Google’s production. Read more
written by Anastasia Sharova
“You can’t be an economist without noticing all the interesting things about how the economy works, it is natural to be interested in it and I have had the privilege to be able to study it” said Alvin A. Roth answering questions during the unexpected 4am call from Sweden. Together with Lloyd S. Shapley, Roth was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel – more commonly known as the Nobel Prize in Economics – “for the theory of stable allocations and practice of market design”. During the award speech the field was described as being “…about economic engineering, [and] how to design certain markets where the traditional market mechanism is expected to not work well.”
The Scientific Background compiled by the Economic Sciences Prize Committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences reads: “This year’s prizewinning work encompasses a theoretical framework for analyzing resource allocation, as well as empirical studies and actual redesign of real-world institutions such as labor-market clearinghouses and school admissions procedures.” The detailed information on this year’s prize and its scientific background can be found here.
If you want to congratulate Alvin A. Roth personally, you can do so in his personal blog Market Design.
Photo Credit: The Official Website of The Nobel Prize
What to expect at your first academic conference and how to prepare for it: first-hand experience
written by Christian Ruiz (Guest Blogger)
There was a certain naiveté in the air when I went to my first academic conference. I thought that all I would have to do is to write a decent paper and to present it to the public. In retrospect this could have ended badly and I wish someone had intercepted me on the way to the airport and given me some key-warnings to know in advance. Thus, after this multifaceted experience, I thought to write the following points in a humble and only half-serious manner.
An academic conference is where scientists and other mostly sun-deprived* human beings dare to get out of their heavily neglected* workspaces in order to academize (*Regressions for these claims will soon be presented by Ruiz et al. under α<0.05 statistical significance). The goal is primarily to present your scientific results to a broad audience – beyond the usual four suspects, who will read your paper anyway – and to know the latest state of research: it wouldn’t be very funny if you invest a lot of time in writing a paper just to find out that someone just published the same thing, right?
A: Preparation before the Conference
The panels usually consist of a few panelists (you?), a moderator, a discussant and a cheering audience. The discussant is supposed to have read all the presented papers and comments on all of the academic contributions after the presentations. Read more
New incentives and awards reflect growing role of young economists
written by Christopher Nash
After our tour of economics conferences this summer, the INOMICS team was impressed by the number of young economists at these events. Anecdotally, many delegates have the impression that there is a trend towards younger academics at even long-established, annual events, as well as more female delegates than were present in the past. Perhaps the time of economics conferences as the preserve of distinguished, yet silver-haired, bearded men is coming to a close.
Whether a contributor to this trend or an outcome, there is also a mass of opportunities for young economists in the form of special sessions and prizes. These may be offered not only as a part of annual conferences, but even by major associations or international research institutes. Here we list some of the prizes for young economists that we have heard about, and think may be interesting to some of the young economists reading this blog.
The Institute for World Economy (IFW) in Kiel, Germany, for example, offers four “Excellence Awards” each year to economists aged 35 or under. The prize is one of four Research Fellowships, which consist of an all expenses paid visit to the IFW in Kiel, including access to its library and resources, as well as ongoing research support. The application window runs from July to October each year, so there is still time to submit your work this time around.
The World Trade Organization holds an annual essay competition for PhD holders under 30, or economists who completed their PhDs within the last two years. Read more
written by Justin Campbell (Guest Blogger)
Prior to 2008 much of the profession was triumphant in its success in achieving economic stability. The period leading up to 2008 was known as the great moderation, characterised by low inflation, strong growth and low unemployment. This period has been followed by the most significant economic event since the great depression. This event has seen increasing doubt over the old consensus and the reincarnation of Keynesian economics.
Just as the era of stagflation in the 1970s saw the decline of Keynesian economics, the current crisis has challenged many of the neoclassical assumptions taught in introductory courses. The current syllabus introduces students to the concept of supply and demand, the role of government, the benefits of trade, the contrast between perfect competition and monopolies as well as basic macroeconomics.
Critics of this approach come from all sides, with Austrian economists complaining it encourages students to view the economy as a machine while other claim it is indoctrinating students with a right wing neoclassical philosophy that relies on simplistic assumptions such as downward sloping demand curves while ignoring economic inequity, as was claimed by those students involved in the occupy Harvard movement.
It could be argued that it is not the syllabus that is the problem, but rather the context in which it is taught. Often, the ideas taught to first year economics students belong to competing ideologies and without exposure to economic history this is often lost. Recently, there has been much debate on the place of economic history in academic programs. Read more
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