Comprehensive placement data from top economics departments worldwide. Search and explore where PhD economists land after graduation.
Data coverage
Each bubble is one department-year. Size reflects cohort size; red indicates field data available, green indicates no field data.
Data explorer
Search and filter placement records by name, field, placement, or department.
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Deep dives
Explore detailed placement outcomes for individual departments, or compare up to three side by side.
Aggregate trends
Interactive exploration of placement trends across time, categories, and departments.
Methodology
We crafted a pipeline that extracts, structures, and validates placement information from public department websites.
We gather placement information from publicly available pages on economics department websites. Our registry covers top programs worldwide, each with its own page listing graduate outcomes.
Collected information is structured to identify key fields: graduate names, placement year, destination institution, position type, and research field.
Data quality checks filter out inconsistencies and duplicate entries. Placement destinations and field names are standardized across departments (to the extent possible).
Clean, structured data is served through this interface. The dataset is periodically refreshed to capture new placement announcements.
Each placement is classified into one of seven categories based on position type and destination institution. Classification combines keyword matching on position titles (e.g., "Assistant Professor", "Postdoc", "Economist") and institution names (e.g., "Federal Reserve", "IMF", "McKinsey") with a context-aware LLM classifier that handles ambiguous cases.
Permanent or tenure-track academic positions including Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Full Professor, and equivalent titles at universities and research institutions worldwide. This category captures traditional academic career paths in economics departments, business schools, and policy schools.
Non-tenure-track academic positions including postdoctoral fellowships, visiting positions, teaching appointments, and any other temporary academic positions that do not carry tenure-track status.
Research and policy positions at central banks worldwide, including the Federal Reserve System (Board and regional banks) and any other national monetary authorities.
Economist positions at multilateral institutions, including the IMF, World Bank Group, OECD, BIS, WTO, UN agencies (UNCTAD, ILO), regional development banks (IDB, ADB, AfDB, EBRD), and similar organizations.
Economist and policy analyst roles in national government agencies, including finance ministries, treasury departments, competition authorities, statistical offices, regulatory agencies, and councils of economic advisers. This spans positions across different levels of government.
Research positions at policy research institutes and non-profit organizations, including Brookings, RAND, J-PAL, Peterson Institute, RFF, and similar institutions that conduct economic research to inform public policy debates.
Positions in the private sector. These include technology companies, consulting, finance, and other corporate roles.
The most important distinction in academic placements is between tenure-track positions (Assistant Professor, Associate Professor) and temporary positions (postdocs, research fellows, visiting positions). This distinction fundamentally affects how we interpret placement outcomes.
The standard approach followed by most departments is to explicitly label postdocs, teaching positions, visiting appointments, and other temporary roles in their placement records. Entries like "MIT (Postdoc)" or "Stanford, Visiting Assistant Professor" are common. When a department lists only an academic institution without any qualifier (e.g., "Princeton"), this typically indicates a tenure-track position.
We follow this convention: unlabeled academic placements are assumed to be tenure-track positions. However, some departments do not consistently label postdocs or other temporary positions, making it impossible to reliably distinguish them from tenure-track roles.
As a result, the share of tenure-track placements in our data may be biased upwards. This should be kept in mind when interpreting placement outcomes.
Coverage and detail vary across departments based on what each institution publishes on their placement pages:
Candidate names: Some departments publish individual names, others only list destination institutions without identifying graduates.
Position types: Detail varies significantly. Some departments specify exact titles ("Assistant Professor of Economics"), others use general labels ("Academia"), and some list only the institution name with no position information.
Historical coverage: Year ranges depend on how far back each department maintains its public records. Some go back over 20 years, others are only available for recent years.
Research fields of candidates: Some departments do not publish field specialization information.
Some departments do not consistently distinguish between tenure-track and postdoc positions in their placement records. Since this distinction is fundamental to our classification system (see above), we perform quality checks on each department's data. Departments that do not reliably differentiate between these position types are excluded from the dataset, as we cannot accurately categorize their placements.
Departments that do not fulfil quality controls:
Additionally, we require departments to have publicly available placement records covering at least two cohorts, including the most recent one (2024-2025). Departments that do not publish placement data, or that only report it for a single year, are also excluded.
Departments that do not meet data availability requirements: