Random Walk Down to the Junior Assistant Professor Market, August 2007

Angus Deaton gives his opinions and reactions to the emerging new crop of assistant professors in economics. This was written in 2007, and describes the year I was on the market, and I take great self-congratulatory delight in having seen all of this too. Of course, you'd have to be absolutely blind not to see both the near-obsession with instrumental variables, as well as its more recent wane. And you'd have to also have been dead if you didn't see the emergence of other techniques taking its place. Now I notice far more interest in genuine random assignments to identify causality. That is to say, economists seem primarily interested in estimating causal relationships, and use IV to do this, but more recently things too like real randomized trials, regression discontinuity and accidental assignments to peer groups to find these connections. It's an exciting time, personally, even if others from higher levels can see its limitations and weaknesses. The article is worth reading, so check it out.