Five Harvard candidates for the Economics job market this year (2011-12)

One of the pleasures of being a professor of economics is the opportunity to interact closely with young economists just as they metamorphose  from being (merely) wonderful students into economists who teach us important new things.

The Talmud makes the point pretty nicely: "The sages said: I have learned much wisdom from my teacher, more from my colleagues and the most from my students" (BT Ta'anit 7a).

This year has been a crash course for me, since I am helping introduce five exceptional young economists to the job market: one postdoc, two students whose main adviser I was privileged to be, and two students who I helped to advise on papers of mutual interest.

They are Clayton Featherstone (also on the Stanford job market page here);
Eduardo Azevedo, and Jacob Leshno; and Yuichiro Kamada, and Katie Baldiga.

I hope to blog about one or more papers by each of them this week, Monday through Friday, if I can keep up. (I don't promise any particular order, let's see how much I can remember about each of them in time; at least this should help me keep their names straight:)

I'll update this announcement with links to the particular posts (and eventually with job market news), for future reference.

What do policy makers want from a market design? And what would be the consequences of giving it to them? Clayton Featherstone on rank efficiency.

Market design in a future of trusted smart markets: paper by Eduardo Azevedo and Eric Budish

Matching Japanese Doctors: problems with the current mechanisms, and suggestions for improvement by Yuichiro Kamada and Fuhito Kojima

Should you guess on the SAT? And do you? Katie Baldiga finds men and women are different.

How to allocate goods when the waiting list is essentially infinite. New queues for overloaded systems, by Jacob Leshno

A supply and demand model for stable matchings, by Eduardo Azevedo and Jacob Leshno

*******************April 2012 updates****************

Katie Baldiga defends her Ph.D. dissertation 

She and her significant other LC solved the two-body problem this year (!), and will be together at The Ohio State University, which is now more than ever a hotbed of experimental economics.

Yuichiro Kamada defends his Ph.D. dissertation

He will be going next year to a postdoc at Yale, after which he'll take up a position at Berkeley-Haas.

Eduardo Azevedo defends his Ph.D. dissertation

As of April 26 it isn't clear whether he'll be working next year in Philadelphia, NYC, or Chicago, which will depend on his fiance's jobmarket, which is still to be concluded.
Update: May 11--It's Wharton.

Jacob Leshno defends his Ph.D. dissertation

He will be going next year to a postdoc at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, after which he'll take up a position at Columbia GSB.

And Clayton Featherstone, who as a postdoc needed no defense (or maybe was indefensible?) will be going next year to Wharton.