Should you get an Economics PhD?

Doing high impact research

Academia

Research in economics academia is a potentially very high impact option because you can work on priority cause areas, like global priorities research or AI policy. For example, to contribute to global priorities research you might work on the economics of existential risk and long-term trajectory change, while the macroeconomics, political economy and industrial organisation of AI will be important for developing informed AI policy.

Doing such research is a realistic option because Economics professors get a lot freedom to do research across a wide range of topics and disciplines. That also gives you great option value for future research. You often even get a high degree of autonomy with your dissertation and aren’t forced to specialise narrowly in your advisor’s research interests, giving you freedom to pursue research topics that you most want to work on during your PhD itself (though we’ve heard that sometimes there is pressure to choose topics with higher publication and job market value).

If you do an economics PhD, you have a decent chance of getting a job as an academic: Data indicates that more than half of economics PhD’s get jobs in academia after their PhD.

Non-academic research

If you don’t get a job in academia, or if you don’t want to, there are other important sectors that explicitly hire economics PhD’s, including:

• Government (e.g. Federal Reserve, Treasury, Department of Justice)

• Nonprofit research organisations and think-tanks (e.g. RAND, National Bureau of Economic Research)

• International organisations (e.g. World Bank, International Monetary Fund)

The impact you can have in these jobs tends to be more direct and focused on specific issues than in academia. Many of these jobs are advertised on the Job Openings for Economists, which means you don’t have to apply for them separately from academic jobs.

Advocacy potential

Having an economics PhD also puts you in a position to build a public platform and become a public intellectual through journalism and writing books.

You can also influence policy through your research, though some claim that most of the time economists just provide arguments for people with pre-existing views. However there could be room for outsized influence if you provide policy recommendations on issues that are orthogonal to popular disputes, and our guess is that in the long-run economists can change conventional wisdom about what is good policy. You might do this by engaging directly with policy or by conducting academic research on the most pressing problems in order to shift the research priorities of the economics community. Examples of organisations working on the latter are the Global Priorities Institute and the Forethought Foundation.

Other benefits

• You gain a broad set of tools for understanding how the social world works, which is helpful for evaluating causes and interventions. This may help you better evaluate your future career options to have more impact. A notable example of this in action is the founding of GiveDirectly (one of GiveWell’s top recommended charities), which was founded by economics PhD students.

• Excellent job prospects: You are nearly guaranteed a job. The unemployment rate for economics PhD’s is very low (0.8% in 2013) and data indicates that it has the lowest unemployment rate of all science and engineering PhD’s.You also get the benefit of the centrally organised Job Openings for Economists, which allows you to apply to many different jobs in a short period of time and interview for them at the same time, in the same place.

• Academic salaries for economics PhD’s tend to be higher than other PhD’s. The median pay for those who gained economics PhD’s in 2013 and were in full-time employment at a university was $108,000, which is higher than all other science PhD’s. Moreover, the jobs outside of academia which economics PhD’s get are higher paid than non-academic jobs other PhD’s get.