Updated October 2026
Evidence from the placement records of economics departments
Abstract The first jobs of the graduates of top economics PhD programs, collected from their departments' placement pages.
Keywords: academic job market, PhD placements, economists. JEL codes: A23, J44.
* Placement records are collected from the public placement pages and reports of 82 economics departments (and archived copies of them) and updated each year; see Methodology. For corrections or removal requests, please see the privacy notice.
Data coverage
Where the records come from, and what each department publishes.
Data explorer
Search by name, employer, field or department, then narrow down with the filters, or filter any column in the box under its heading. Hover over a placement to see the text exactly as the department published it.
| Name | Year | Department | Field | Placement | Category |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Loading placements… | |||||
Deep dives
Placement outcomes for one department, or up to four side by side, and the departments the largest employers hire from. Periods count each department's own most recent cohorts, since not every department has published its latest placements yet.
Aggregate trends
How outcomes change over time, and how departments, fields and employers compare.
Methodology
Placement information is collected from the public websites of economics departments, then structured and checked.
Placement records are collected from each department's public placement page or report: names where published, graduation year, research fields, and the placement as listed. Cohorts a department no longer lists are recovered from archived copies of its page in the Internet Archive, and research fields a placement page omits from archived copies of the department's job-market candidates pages.
Each placement entry is read by a language model, and the employer is recorded under a consistent name, together with the position, the country and one of seven categories. Research fields are mapped to a common list.
Collected records are checked against the departments' pages, and the classification is tested against a set of verified cases.
The data is updated each year once departments publish their new cohort. Every record shown here can be downloaded as a CSV.
Each placement is assigned by a language model to one of seven categories, based on the position and the employer.
The most important distinction in academic placements is between tenure-track positions (Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, UK Lecturer) and temporary positions (postdocs, research fellows, visiting and teaching positions).
Most departments label postdocs and other temporary roles explicitly ("MIT (Postdoc)", "Stanford, Visiting Assistant Professor"). When a department lists only a university with no position (e.g. "Princeton"), we follow that convention and count it as a tenure-track job. When a graduate takes a postdoc before starting a faculty job they already hold, the placement counts as tenure-track.
Some departments do not label temporary positions consistently, so the tenure-track share may be biased upwards. Keep this in mind when comparing departments.
Coverage and detail vary across departments, depending on what each one publishes:
Names: some departments publish graduates' names; others list only where their graduates went.
Positions: some give exact titles ("Assistant Professor of Economics"); others list only the employer.
History: year ranges depend on how far back each department keeps its records, from five cohorts to more than thirty. Where a department has trimmed or replaced its page, earlier cohorts come from archived copies of it (Internet Archive), kept only when they list first placements; archived copies are also compared with today's pages to catch entries changed after the fact.
Fields: only some departments list research fields on their placement pages. For the others, a graduate's fields are taken from the department's job-market candidates page as archived during their market (by the Internet Archive or, where it has no copy, Common Crawl), where that page states them for the graduate by name (not from descriptions of their research). Where a department publishes fields too, the two agree on the research area for 98% of graduates.
Latest cohort: departments post new placements at different times, so the most recent year may be missing for some of them.
Citation
If you use these data in your work, please cite the dataset.
García-Guzmán, Pablo. 2026. The Econ PhD Placements Dataset. Version of October 2026. https://www.econphdplacements.com.
@misc{garciaguzman2026econphd,
author = {Garc{\'i}a-Guzm{\'a}n, Pablo},
title = {The Econ {PhD} Placements Dataset},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://www.econphdplacements.com}},
note = {Version of October 2026}
}