Showing posts with label job market. Show all posts
Showing posts with label job market. Show all posts

Sunday, March 3, 2024

Telephones and telephone operators, as telephone exchanges became automated

 Earlier experiences in automation may be helpful in thinking about current technologies. Here's a paper about automation that replaced telephone operators, largely in the early 20th Century.  (But in 1980, when I lived in Farmer City Illinois, our telephone provider was GTE (General Telephone & Electronics Corporation), not AT&T, and they still relied in part on human operators.)

Answering the Call of Automation: How the Labor Market Adjusted to Mechanizing Telephone Operation by James Feigenbaum and Daniel P Gross, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, forthcoming

Abstract: In the early 1900s, telephone operation was among the most common jobs for American women, and telephone operators were ubiquitous. Between 1920 and 1940, AT&T undertook one of the largest automation investments in modern history, replacing operators with mechanical switching technology in over half of the U.S. telephone network. Using variation across U.S. cities in the timing of adoption, we study how this wave of automation affected the labor market for young women. Although automation eliminated most of these jobs, it did not reduce future cohorts’ overall employment: the decline in operators was counteracted by employment growth in middle-skill clerical jobs and lower-skill service jobs, including in new categories of work. Using a new genealogy-based census-linking method, we show that incumbent telephone operators were most impacted, and a decade later more likely to be in lower-paying occupations or no longer working.

Friday, January 26, 2024

The DOJ on competition for workers

 A lot of market design is done by regulators, and some of that is done to enforce existing laws.  Here's a report from the Department of Justice, focusing on four cases involving payment to workers (including authors of books).

Athey, Susan, Mark Chicu, Malika Krishna, and Ioana Marinescu. "The Year in Review: Economics at the Antitrust Division, 2022–2023." Review of Industrial Organization (2024): 1-20.

"In this review article, we report on five enforcement matters that expanded the scope of enforcement by the Division. The first four enforcement matters highlight a number of the Division’s actions to protect labor market competition in criminal and civil merger and non-merger cases. These include: criminal enforcement against a provider of contract health care staffing services that allocated nurse employees through a no-poaching agreement and agreed to fix the wages of those nurses; civil enforcement to stop an e-Sports league from effectively imposing a salary cap on its players; civil enforcement to stop a conspiracy among poultry processors to share information about worker compensation; and the successful challenge of a merger between two of the largest book publishers in the U.S., which preserved competition for books that will benefit authors."

Saturday, December 9, 2023

JOE Job Openings for Economists: 2023 versus the past 4 years

 Here's the latest note on the job market from the AEA's  Committee on the Job Market.  It reflects a tight job market (but may also reflect that fewer than 100% of available jobs are published in the JOE, and this may be in flux). The full memo is at the link below, and I'm summarizing here some of the highlights (trigger warning:(

JOE Job Openings by Sector, 2023 versus the past 4 years 

"To: Members of the American Economic Association

From: AEA Committee on the Job Market: John Cawley (chair), Matt Gentzkow, Brooke Helppie-McFall, Al Roth, Peter Rousseau, and Wendy Stock  Date: December 8, 2023

This memo reports the cumulative number of unique job openings on Job Openings for Economists (JOE), by sector and week, compared to the same week in recent years.

Some clarifications on the data and graphs in this memo:

• ...

• The data described in this memo cover ISO weeks 1 through 48, which in 2023 ended December 3.

• The counts that are graphed and discussed are the number of job openings. To clarify, it is not the number of job listings; a listing may include multiple openings.

• ...

• On each graph, the year-to-date cumulative number of job openings is listed for the past five years separately: 2019-2023. The graphs are shown below, overall and by sector. 

Figure 1 (on p. 3) shows the total number of job openings in 2023, compared to recent years. As of the end of week 48, there have been 2,924 jobs listed on JOE since the beginning of 2023, which is 14.7% lower than at the same week in 2022, 8.7% lower than the same week in 2021, 21.9% higher than the same week in 2020 (the worst COVID year), and 15.9% lower than the same week in 2019, the last pre- COVID year.

Subsequent graphs compare the number of job openings separately by sector. Figure 2 shows that 741 full-time academic positions in the U.S. have been listed on JOE so far in 2023; this is 16.5% lower than at the same week in 2022, 0.4% lower than at the same week in 2021, 109.3% higher than at the same week in 2020, and 8.2% lower than the same week in 2019 - see p. 4.

Figure 4 shows that 949 full-time academic job openings in institutions outside the U.S. have been listed on JOE so far in 2023; that is 7.2% lower than at the same week in 2022, 9.5% lower than the same week in 2021, 11.1% higher than at the same week in 2020, and 16.7% lower than the same week in 2019 - see p. 6.

Figure 6 shows that 508 full-time non-academic positions (in the U.S. or abroad) have been listed on JOE so far in 2023; that is 26.8% lower than at the same week in 2022, 30.0% lower than at the same week in 2021, 18.2% lower than the same time in 2020 and 35.4% lower than the same week in 2019 - see p. 8.

Over the past four years, roughly 92% of the calendar year’s job listings have been posted by the end of November. In January 2024, we will post a year-end report that includes the final numbers for 2023.

The AEA Executive Committee and the Committee on the Job Market provide the following guidance for the job market, to ensure common expectations, fairness, and a thick job market. This guidance concerns the timing of interview invitations, the interviews themselves, and exploding job offers.

...






Friday, November 3, 2023

Jobs for economists, so far this year

Here's a preliminary AEA memo on the job market.

"To: Members of the American Economic Association 

From: AEA Committee on the Job Market: John Cawley (chair), Matt Gentzkow, Brooke Helppie-McFall, Al Roth, Peter Rousseau, and Wendy Stock

Date: October 26, 2023

Re: JOE job openings by sector, 2023 versus the past 4 years

This memo reports the cumulative number of unique job openings on Job Openings for Economists (JOE), by sector and week, compared to the same week in recent years.

...

"Figure 1 (on p. 3) shows the total number of job openings in 2023, compared to recent years. As of the end of week 41, there have been 2,006 jobs listed on JOE since the beginning of 2023, which is 13.2% lower than at the same time in 2022, roughly the same (-0.10% lower) as in 2021, 51.3% higher than this time in 2020 (the worst COVID year), and 13.2% lower than 2019, the last pre-COVID year. 




"Our committee cautions that the largest number of listings in JOE occur in October and November, so by early December we’ll have a much better sense of the job market for Ph.D. economists.
...
"Further updates regarding the job market for Ph.D. economists will be posted to the Committee’s

Sunday, July 2, 2023

Who marries whom?

 The Washington Post "Department of Data" presents some census data on who marries whom.

What does your job say about whom you’ll marry?  Analysis by Andrew Van Dam  June 16, 2023 







Friday, June 2, 2023

Dissertation advisors and job market outcomes by Rose and Shekhar

 Here's a paper on the economics job market, and the influence of dissertation advisers.

Adviser Connectedness and Placement Outcomes in the Economics Job Market, by Michael E. Rose and Suraj Shekhar, forthcoming in Labour Economics

Abstract: We study the role of social networks in the academic job market for graduate students of Economics. We find that the connectedness of a student’s advisor in the coauthor network significantly improves her job market outcome. We use two identification strategies and find that a) higher Eigenvector centrality of an adviser leads to her student getting placed at a better ranked institution, and b) larger distance between an adviser and an institution decreases the probability that her students are placed there. Our study sheds light on the importance of social connections in a labour market where information frictions regarding job openings are virtually absent.

...

"Our setting, the academic job market for Economists, is special in that information frictions regarding job openings are (almost) absent due to Job Openings for Economists. Thus, our finding that social networks play a role in this market is likely because they help decrease the uncertainty about an applicant’s quality."

********

I'm reminded of the timeless joke about how rabbits eat wolves: if you don't know it, there are many versions on the internet, here  (and this one comes with a bonus joke: Rabbit's Ph.D. Thesis and Lion's Watch Repair Business).

Saturday, April 15, 2023

Jobs at risk from AI chatbots

 The WSJ has the alarming news:

The Fortune Cookie Industry Is in Upheaval. ‘Expect Big Changes Ahead.’ Factories split over whether to use software, instead of humans, to write the random bits of wisdom inside the wafers. ‘Society is moving too fast.’  By Angus Loten

"Over the past two decades, Charles Li, the owner and chief executive of Chicago-based fortune-cookie factory Winfar Foods Inc., has drawn on Chinese proverbs and popular sayings to write thousands of messages that go into the wafers. Mr. Li says he and his 80-year-old father-in-law spend long hours coming up with lines that are clever but still brief enough to fit on a ribbon of paper.

...

"OpenFortune Inc., a New York-based company that supplies printed messages to well over a dozen fortune-cookie factories around the world, says it has started using ChatGPT technology to potentially generate a near-limitless inventory of new messages.

"Making up the sayings in the cookies is a vigorous line of work. By some estimates, three billion fortune cookies are made by factories around the world every year. Nearly all are written by a handful of fortune-cookie factory owners, their families or small teams of copywriters."

Friday, March 17, 2023

Talent management in the Marine Corps--lateral entry?

"Talent management" is making inroads in the armed forces.  One anomaly of military service is that almost all of its personnel enter the business at around age 18: there is almost no lateral entry.  But some skills, such as those related to cyber warfare, can also be cultivated in the private sector.  Think how hard it would be to run a tech company if you could only recruit your people right out of high school or college. 

Defense One has the story:

Marines See Early Successes in Retention Push—and Ways to Do Better. Meanwhile, the commandant wants to bring skilled people into the Corps at advanced ranks.

"Monday’s update highlights Berger’s dissatisfaction with the Corps’ progress toward what’s called “lateral entry”—enabling recruits with critical skills to come in at a rank that reflects their experience. The commandant wants the lateral-entry system to focus first on reservists and Marines who have left the service. This could help fill cyber jobs and others in which the Corps competes with the civilian sector, Glynn said.   

 ...

The service is still working on bringing to life its Talent Management Engagement Portal, which the update calls “a must-pay bill.” It is meant to improve career assignment selections with a transparent “marketplace” for Marines, units, and assignment managers, according to Glynn."

**********

Here's the Marine Corps' report Talent Management 2030 from November 2021

"CREATING A PATH TO LATERAL ENTRY

"Our current enlisted recruiting model is optimized for ecruiting teenagers, and for officers, those in their early twenties. (It was not always this way: During theInterwar Period, potential enlisted recruits had to be over 21 and required a character reference from an employer, teacher, coach, or religious leader). While we will always seek to attract young Americans to our ranks, we do not have an effective vehicle for finding, recruiting, and onboarding talented Americans who already possess critical skills. In other words, there is currently only one way to join the Marine Corps – at the bottom. 

...

"The rapid rise in importance of the cyber domain, for instance, has challenged us to find creative ways to quickly build critical skills at mid-career and senior levels. Unless we find a means to quickly infuse expertise into the force – at the right ranks – I am concerned that advances in artificial intelligence and robotics, among other fields where the speed of technological change is exponential, will force us into a reactive posture. We should have an open door for exceptionally talented Americans who wish to join the Marine Corps, allowing them to laterally enter at a rank appropriate to their education, experience, and ability."

And, somewhat separately

"CREATING A TALENT MARKETPLACE

"Taking advantage of the initial lessons learned by the Army, Navy, and Air Force, we are developing a web-based “talent marketplace,” where units post job information about available billets, Marines apply for those positions virtually, and monitors serve as overall managers and arbiters. While much in the way of mechanics remains to be determined, I am committed to creating a process that places increased responsibility in the hands of unit commanders and individual Marines, employs cutting edge technology, and preserves a vital role for headquarters. Initially, our talent marketplace will be for officers, and eventually senior enlisted, while we assess options for changes to the junior enlisted assignments process."

**************

Earlier:

Wednesday, November 10, 2021

Monday, February 27, 2023

AEA committee on the job market considers early and exploding offers

 John Cawley chairs the AEA committee on the job market, and recently tweeted the request for information below.  Feel free to communicate with him on twitter or directly, as I'll be glad to rely on him to compile and forward all the responses. (I'm one of the few economists not on most social media...but I really will try to read all responses:) (Click to enlarge...)



Sunday, February 5, 2023

Advice on dealing with exploding offers in the Economics job market

 The market for new Economics Ph.D.s is in flux, with interviews this year being conducted remotely by Zoom rather than in person at the annual January conference. (Zoom interviews were a Covid innovation that seems likely to stay--mostly because remote interviews seemed to work well.)  But issues of timing can be delicate, and there's some concern that, now that initial interviews aren't being synchonized with the annual meetings, we're seeing more early interviews, flyouts (subsequent in-person, on campus interviews) and offers than in previous years, including more offers that require replies very quickly--exploding offers.  Exploding offers cause difficulties to those who receive them, and they contribute to market-wide difficulties, as they can cause the market to move earlier from year to year, i.e. to unravel into very early offers at diffuse times, so that the market loses thickness.

So...I wasn't too surprised to get an email this week from a colleague who has a student on the market who presently has two exploding offers, each with a one-week deadline.  My colleague writes that his student  presently has flyouts scheduled with other schools through February, and so won't even have visited them by the time his exploding offers expire. "He would much prefer an offer from several of them to these 2 current offers--but I have no idea what is the likelihood of getting offers from them."

He asks me "Does any entity such as the ASSA, Stanford, etc. have a policy that I can mention to these schools? "  And he asks for my advice.  I don't have great advice, but here's my slightly redacted reply:

"The AEA doesn’t have a good policy on this, but the AFA does: see my blog post here

Tuesday, August 2, 2022 American Finance Association guidelines to prevent unravelling of the job market  (it says) “the AFA promotes the following professional norm: If a job candidate receives and accepts a coercive exploding offer (i.e., one that expires before February 20), the AFA does not consider such an acceptance to be binding.”

 "That said, talking to the schools that have issued coercive exploding offers is a good idea, and it may or may not help.  I think there are three main reasons they might make exploding offers.

  • 1.       Pure evil: they think your student might get a better offer if they wait, and want to capture him before that.
  • 2.       Fear that their other candidates will disappear: they may have a second choice candidate who already has an exploding offer, in which case they may be able to tell you when that offer explodes.  But maybe their fear is less focused than that, in which case you might get them to extend the offer on the understanding that they can make it explode later.
  • 3.       Boilerplate: they may have just copy-pasted from some template that had a short fuse offer. In this case there’s a good chance they’ll relax the drop dead date.

 "I’ve encountered other reasons as well. In the 2008 financial crisis some of our students got exploding offers, and when I called one school to inquire, was told that their dean wouldn’t allow them to schedule any more flyouts until/unless they’d been rejected by our student.

 "There are labor markets that suffer a great deal from exploding offers (e.g. private equity right now, among others).  But it’s still not the norm in economics, so I think you have a good chance of getting some more time by asking for it."


Monday, January 9, 2023

Non-compete clauses are anti-competitive: Lina Kahn (FTC chair) in the NYT

 An op-ed this morning by the chair of the FTC explains her opposition to non-compete clauses in labor contracts (which are already non-enforceable in California), following last week's proposed Non-Compete Clause Rulemaking

Lina Khan: Noncompetes Depress Wages and Kill Innovation,  by By Lina M. Khan (chair of the Federal Trade Commission) Jan. 9, 2023 

"Noncompetes were long assumed to apply mainly to high-level executives with access to sensitive corporate information. But their use has exploded in the past few decades, extending far beyond the boardroom. Today, experts estimate that one out of every five American workers, or about 30 million people, are bound by a noncompete. Studies and media reports have found noncompetes routinely invoked against fast-food workers, arborists and manual laborers, to name a few examples. Just this week, the Federal Trade Commission, where I am chair, settled allegations against a company in Michigan that prohibited its workers — security guards earning at or near the minimum wage — from going to work for a competitor within a 100-mile radius of their job location for two years. 

...

"over the past few decades, several states restricted the enforceability of noncompete clauses to various degrees, usually because of court decisions. This created natural experiments, allowing researchers to draw causal inferences about their impact.

"Their most staggering finding: Noncompete clauses systemically drive down wages, even for workers who aren’t bound by one. Every worker stuck in a job represents a position that isn’t opening up for someone else. And if employers know their workers can’t leave, they have less incentive to offer competitive pay and benefits, which puts downward pressure on wages for everyone.

...

"the evidence to date suggests that noncompetes suppress wages, reduce competition and keep innovative ideas from breaking into the market. One study even found that noncompetes lead to higher prices for consumers by reducing competition in the heavily concentrated health care sector.

"Noncompetes are the type of restriction that Section 5 of the F.T.C. Act, a federal law passed by Congress more than a century ago, is supposed to prevent. That’s why the F.T.C. last week proposed a rule forbidding companies to subject workers to noncompetes. Under the proposal, noncompetes would be designated an “unfair method of competition,” which the law prohibits. The rule would apply to professions across the board — janitors, nurses, engineers, journalists. Because employers often try to use noncompetes even when they’re unenforceable, the rule would require companies to proactively notify employees currently subject to noncompetes that those restrictions are now void.

"People might worry that eliminating noncompetes would make it impossible for companies to hold on to their secrets. But there is good reason to believe that more-targeted alternatives, such as nondisclosure agreements and trade secret law, would get the job done without imposing such a burden on the economy."

Friday, December 23, 2022

Postdoctoral opportunities in kidney exchange, in the U.K. with David Manlove and Daniel Paulusma

 David Manlove writes to invite applications for postdocs with him and Daniel Paulusma to work on kidney exchange.

"There are three positions available to work on algorithms and software for kidney exchange as part of the EPSRC-funded KidneyAlgo project: New Algorithms for UK and International Kidney Exchange (https://gow.epsrc.ukri.org/NGBOViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/X013618/1 and https://gow.epsrc.ukri.org/NGBOViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/X01357X/1).

 1. Postdoctoral Research Associate at Glasgow, working with David Manlove.  This position requires expert knowledge in the areas of algorithm design and analysis and/or operational research and combinatorial optimisation.  See https://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~davidm/adverts/RA-advert.html for further details.  The closing date is 31 January 2023.

 2.  Postdoctoral Research Associate at Durham, working with Daniel Paulusma.  This position has a focus on researching computational complexity aspects of fairness concepts from Cooperative Game Theory.  See https://durham.taleo.net/careersection/du_ext/jobdetail.ftl?job=22002075&lang=en&src=JB10200 for further details.  The closing date is 30 January 2023.

 3. Research Software Engineer at Glasgow, working with David Manlove.  This position requires excellent programming skills and substantial prior software development experience.  See https://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~davidm/adverts/RSE-advert.html for further details.  The closing date is 31 January 2023.

 Please do pass this email on to anyone who you feel might be interested."

Monday, November 7, 2022

Stanford Economics Ph.D. Job Market Candidates for the 2022-23 Economics Job Market.

 22 candidates for the 2022-23 Economics Job Market, from B to Z.

Stanford, Department of Economics Job Market Candidates

Available November 2022 for positions in Summer/Fall 2023

Placement Officers: Pete Klenow 650-725-2620 klenow@stanford.edu and Liran Einav 650-723-3704  leinav@stanford.edu

Trevor Bakker

Aniket Baksy

Lukas Bolte

Yue Cao

Daniele Caratelli

Alex Chan

Fulya Ersoy

Tony Fan

Robin Han

Brian Higgins

Tingyan Jia

Matteo Leombroni

Gina Li

Negar Matoorian Pour

Agathe Pernoud

Beatriz Pousada

Maxwell Rong

Rachel Schuh

Martin Souchier

Reka Zempleni

Adam Zhang

Sally Zhang

Monday, October 24, 2022

Informationally Simple Incentives by Simon Gleyze and Agathe Pernoud

 Agathe Pernoud is on the Economics job market from Stanford this year, and is interested in the properties of information in environments in which agents may need to learn their own preferences.

Here are two papers that advance the theory of those situations, and expand on the fragility of 'dominant strategies' as the strategy space is enlarged.

Informationally Simple Incentives by Simon Gleyze and Agathe Pernoud, Journal of Political Economy, forthcoming.

Abstract: We consider a mechanism design setting in which agents can acquire costly information on their preferences as well as others’. A mechanism is informationally simple if agents have no incentive to learn about others’ preferences. This property is of interest for two reasons: First, it is a necessary condition for the existence of dominant strategy equilibria in the extended game.  Second, this endogenizes an “independent private value” property of the interim information structure. We show that, generically, a mechanism is informationally simple if and only if it satisfies a separability condition which rules out most economically meaningful mechanisms."


See also Agathe's job market paper:

How Competition Shapes Information in Auctions by Simon Gleyze and Agathe Pernoud

We consider auctions where buyers can acquire costly information about their valuations and those of others, and investigate how competition between buyers shapes their learning incentives. In equilibrium, buyers find it cost-efficient to acquire some information about their competitors so as to only learn their valuations when they have a fair chance of winning. We show that such learning incentives make competition between buyers less effective: losing buyers often fail to learn their valuations precisely and, as a result, compete less aggressively for the good. This depresses revenue, which remains bounded away from the expected second-highest valuation even when information costs are small. It also undermines price discovery. Finally, we examine the implications for auction design. First, setting an optimal reserve price is more valuable than attracting an extra buyer. Second, the seller can incentivize buyers to learn their valuations, hence restoring effective competition, by maintaining uncertainty over the set of auction participants.


Tuesday, September 27, 2022

Where do professors come from?

 A news article in Nature summarizes two research articles into the makeup of the American professoriate.  Professors tend to have gotten their PhDs from prestigious American universities, and to have grown up in families with college educated parents, some with advanced degrees.

Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities  by Anna Nowogrodzki

"One in eight US-trained tenure-track faculty members got their PhDs from just five elite universities: the University of California, Berkeley; Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; Stanford University in California; and the University of Wisconsin–Madison."

...

"This picture of elitism is bolstered by a study published last month in Nature Human Behaviour2, showing that almost 25% of faculty members in the United States have at least one parent with a PhD (in the general population, less than 1% of people have a parent with a PhD).

...

"Depending on the field, only 5–23% of faculty members worked at an institution more prestigious than the one at which they earned their PhD, according to the analysis. Fields with the least ‘upward mobility’ included classics and economics, whereas those with the most included animal science and pharmacology."

Sources:

Quantifying hierarchy and dynamics in US faculty hiring and retention by K. Hunter Wapman, Sam Zhang, Aaron Clauset & Daniel B. Larremore  Nature (2022)

Socioeconomic roots of academic faculty by Allison C. Morgan, Nicholas LaBerge, Daniel B. Larremore, Mirta Galesic, Jennie E. Brand & Aaron Clauset ,Nature Human Behaviour (2022)




Monday, September 26, 2022

Job swaps in the Air Force

 Here's the story, from Air and Space Forces Magazine:

Bass Announces Changes to Assignment Policies—Including Job Swaps Sept. 21, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

"The Air Force is poised to revamp how it does assignments, Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass announced Sept. 21—including a policy allowing Airmen to swap assignments with each other.

...

"The changes to enlisted assignments are the result of recommendations from the Enlisted Assignment Working Group, Bass said. The working group, which she first announced in April 2021, was tasked with making the assignment process more flexible and transparent, with an eye toward how assignments should look in 2030 and beyond.

...

Perhaps the biggest round of applause, however, came after Bass teased a new “assignment swap policy.”

The Air Force previously had an assignment exchange program for Airmen in the continental U.S. Enlisted and officers could find other Airmen with the same grade and speciality and apply to swap assignments.

The program was shut down, however, when it was determined to be “unfair,” according to an Air Force Personnel Center post on Facebook. Because Airmen had to cover their own moving expenses, some in the lower ranks couldn’t afford to participate. All told, less than 5 percent of Airmen took advantage of the program.

Bass declined to share any details on the new assignment swap policy, and an Air Force Personnel Center spokeswoman told Air & Space Forces Magazine that the service is still “in the early stages of establishing” program, with no set start date established.

“We are working with our partners to build out the process and identify business rules to make the program more inclusive with minimum restrictions,” the spokeswoman added."

********

Earlier: 

Tuesday, December 1, 2020

Saturday, September 3, 2022

Further unraveling of law firm offers to (first year) law students, and offers to new (first week) bankers from private equity

Eric Budish writes with a pointer to a Business Insider story on the current unraveling of the market for new lawyers and big law firms.

Inside the 'Wild West' of law-school recruiting that has Big Law reeling in talent earlier and more aggressively than ever

"this year, some legal-industry professionals say the competition has gotten out of control.

"Latham & Watkins, which hires about 300 students a year for its 10-week summer program, has told law schools that it has made 2023 summer-job offers to so many students ahead of the traditional period for on-campus interviews, or OCI, that it expects to conduct fewer OCI interviews this year, three people familiar with the firm's strategy said.

"Other elite firms — including Weil, Skadden, and Davis Polk — have also been making large numbers of early offers. At Simpson Thacher, a partner said, "We probably did half our interviewing before the formal OCI process."

"Working at a law firm after a student's second year, or 2L, has long been a rite of passage for students bound for Big Law. "Summer associates" are paid about $4,000 a week at top firms and get the chance to do legal research, eat nice meals on the company's dime, and meet the people they'll likely be working with after graduation — because upwards of 90% of them get an offer to return full time.

...

"Some law students are now entering recruiting talks in the spring of their 1L year. School administrators say it's often the students who get the ball rolling by submitting résumés via a firm's website after meeting a partner at a school meet and greet.

...

"Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania still ban pre-OCI recruiting, their websites said. Other schools require pre-OCI offers to stay open until OCI, so a student can compare firms. But not all firms respect the rules, and students sometimes are afraid to invoke them, said David Diamond, an assistant dean at Northwestern University's Pritzker School of Law.

"We've seen situations where a student receives an offer, and the offer deadline follows our policy, but the offer is accompanied by a diversity scholarship, and the diversity scholarship expires before or during" OCI, Diamond said.

...
"Some people trace the boom in early recruiting to a 2019 decision by the NALP to scrap rules that limited firms from courting first-semester law students. The rules were replaced by nonbinding guidelines."
**********
And even more frenzied are the job offers that new bankers (in their first week(s) on the job) are getting from private equity firms:

Wall Street just kicked off an annual Hunger Games-style recruiting ritual for junior talent that has young bankers interviewing till 2 a.m. for jobs that don’t start until 2024. https://advance.lexis.com/api/document?collection=news&id=urn:contentItem:668V-4FD1-DXY7-W4MT-00000-00&context=1516831 

"As Insider reported on Tuesday, the frenzied process appears to have kicked off on Monday evening when recruiters for a handful of firms sent out blast emails to select junior bankers suggesting meetings ASAP — before the window of opportunity closes.

"The emails forced these young bankers — many of whom have just started their first Wall Street jobs at places like Goldman Sachs and Citi — to figure out ways to quietly leave their desks to interview for jobs that won't start until the fall of 2024. 
...
"In recent years, the PE recruiting process has moved earlier and earlier, from October to September, but never to late August, as it has done now. It's forcing firms to figure out how to interview candidates with no real job experience. "



Sunday, August 7, 2022

Jobs and spouses in Denmark

 Matching is both consequential and difficult: it is how we sort into jobs and careers, and marriages and families.  Here's a paper that looks at the relationship between those two matching markets, taking advantage of the fact that Danish medical grads get random priorities, which determine their early-career job matches.

Causal Effects of Early Career Sorting on Labor and Marriage Market Choices: A Foundation for Gender Disparities and Norms  by Itzik Fadlon, Frederik Plesner Lyngse & Torben Heien Nielsen, NBER WORKING PAPER 28245, DOI 10.3386/w28245 ISSUE DATE December 2020, REVISION DATE July 2022

Abstract: "We study whether and how early labor market choices determine longer-run career versus family outcomes differentially for male and female professionals. We analyze the physician labor market by exploiting a randomized lottery that determines the sorting of Danish physicians into internships across local labor markets. Using administrative data spanning ten years after physicians’ graduations, we find causal effects of early-career sorting on a range of life cycle outcomes that cascade from labor market choices, including human capital accumulation and occupational choice, to marriage market choices, including matching and fertility. The persistent effects are entirely concentrated among women, whereas men experience only temporary career disruptions. The evidence points to differential family-career tradeoffs and the mentorship employers provide as channels underlying this gender divergence. Our findings have implications for policies aimed at gender equality in outcomes, as they reveal how persistent gaps can arise even in institutionally gender-neutral settings with early-stage equality of opportunity."


"placement into medical internships—i.e., physicians’ first jobs—is governed in Denmark by a purely randomized lottery ... As we verify, students with the best lottery ranks,who are the ones that choose  first,are  effectively  unrestricted in their  choices  and  are assigned  their  highest priorities,whereas students with the worst lottery ranks,who are the ones that choose last and well after their choice sets have narrowed, are assigned their lowest priorities.

...

"we exploit a novel dataset that combines the formal lottery data we have digitized with a range of administrative datasets on all medical doctors in Denmark. ... we can link households using spousal and parent-child linkages to investigate family formation and fertility. Together, the data allow us to study a wide range of lifecycle choices, in both the labor market and the marriage market, which provides us with the unique advantage of conducting a comprehensive analysis on the broad potential causal effects of early careerson work versus family tradeoffs. The data allow us to track our sample over a long period of up to ten years after the treatment.

...

"We show that the women who have more children due to the treatment also invest less in human capital, and that their location decisions reflect family considerations as they show increased propensity to live near grandparents. This is consistent with women crowding out long-run career goals for more family-oriented choices as  a  result  of  unfavorable early-career placements.  In  comparison,  men engage in career-oriented actions in response to unfavorable placements,which help them fend off potential adverse effects. .... the data are strongly inconsistent with differential preferences  over  entry-level  positions as  a  channel. Males  and  females  reveal  very  similar  aggregate preferences in their choices over entry-level markets and positions.


Tuesday, August 2, 2022

American Finance Association guidelines to prevent unravelling of the job market

 Zoom is changing interview practices, and there's concern that academic markets for new Ph.D grads could unravel. The AFA is on the case for the finance market with these guidelines:

Guidelines for the AFA Rookie Recruiting Cycle

The AFA rookie job market cycle of 2021-2022 created uncertainty, confusion, and unneeded stress for job market candidates and for recruiters. In the interest of developing a more coordinated job market that benefits all involved, the AFA Board has the following suggested guidelines.

Timing of interviews:

Initial interviews can be virtual or in person, but the AFA recommends that the initial interviews should not begin before December 15, 2022, and that the timing of the “campus visit” should occur after the AFA meeting.

Timing of job offers:

In order to facilitate the best matching between candidates and positions, the AFA Board believes strongly that job offers should remain open until at least February 20. The AFA Board also encourages employers to abstain from giving exploding offers with too short of a time frame, since they are unfair to the candidates. Consequently, the AFA promotes the following professional norm: If a job candidate receives and accepts a coercive exploding offer (i.e., one that expires before February 20), the AFA does not consider such an acceptance to be binding.

These guidelines are designed for the AFA rookie recruiting cycle and do not pertain to recruiting cycles for other job markets such as the FMA or European job markets.


HT: Alex Chan

Tuesday, July 26, 2022

The (local) labor markets for terrorists and drug traffickers

 It's so hard to hire good help nowadays, but two papers in the latest Econometrica give us some insight into how that problem is solved in the labor markets for terrorists, and for narcotics.

First terrorism, which turns out to have a local financing element, suggesting frictions in moving money and terrorists...

TERRORISM FINANCING, RECRUITMENT, AND ATTACKS, by NICOLA LIMODIO, Econometrica, Vol. 90, No. 4 (July, 2022), 1711–1742

Abstract: This  paper  investigates  the  effect  of  terrorism  financing  and  recruitment  on  attacks. I exploit a Sharia-compliant institution in Pakistan, which induces unintended and quasi-experimental variation in the funding of terrorist groups through their religious affiliation. The results indicate that higher terrorism financing, in a given location and period, generate more attacks in the same location and period. Financing exhibits a complementarity in producing attacks with terrorist recruitment, measured through data from Jihadist-friendly online fora and machine learning. A higher supply of terror is responsible for the increase in attacks and is identified by studying groups with different affiliations operating in multiple cities. These findings are consistent with terrorist organizations facing financial frictions to their internal capital market.

"I study two aspects of the relationship between terrorism financing and attacks: (1) the correlation between the timing of financing and attacks; (2) the relation between financing and recruitment in generating attacks. To investigate the first point, I follow 1750 cities over 588 months between 1970 and 2018 containing the universe of terrorist attacks (e.g.,more than 14,000 events). I also build a panel with 29 terrorist groups operating in the same number of cities and the same period. To study the second point, I combine data from multiple online fora active in Pakistan disseminating Jihadist-friendly material with the work of two judges and a machine-learning algorithm, leveraging novel techniques from the computer science literature.

"The  natural  experiment  affects  a  specific  form  of  charitable  donation  and  terrorism financing through an Islamic institution: the Zakat. During Ramadan, Muslim individuals offer this Sharia-compliant contribution to philanthropic causes. While the amount is a personal choice, the Pakistani government collects a mandatory payment through a levy on bank deposits applied immediately before Ramadan.1When the tax hits fewer people due to its unique design, there is an increase in donations. This expansion in charitable donations boosts the probability that funds reach terrorist organizations due to multiple extremist groups having a legal charity branch.2 This unintended channel through which the design of the Zakat levy promotes terrorism financing has also been acknowledged by Pakistani government officials in the past.#"

# (cited newspaper article):"Information Minister Pervaiz Rashid has advised people to pay Zakat and charity to institutions which save lives and not to those producing suicide bombers."

**************

And then there's narcotics production and narco-terrorism, which to some extent runs in families.  The paper begins with this quote:

"The only way to survive, to buy food, was to grow poppy and marijuana, and from the age of 15, I began to grow, harvest, and sell.– Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, when asked how he became the leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel"

Making a Narco: Childhood Exposure to Illegal Labor Markets and Criminal Life Paths, by Maria Micaela Sviatschi, https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA17082, ECONOMETRICA: JUL 2022, VOLUME 90, ISSUE 4, p. 1835-1878

Abstract: This paper provides evidence that exposure to illegal labor markets during childhood leads to the formation of industry‐specific human capital at an early age, putting children on a criminal life path. Using the timing of U.S. antidrug policies, I show that when the return to illegal activities increases in coca suitable areas in Peru, parents increase the use of child labor for coca farming, putting children on a criminal life path. Using administrative records, I show that affected children are about 30% more likely to be incarcerated for violent and drug‐related crimes as adults. No effect in criminality is found for individuals that grow up working in places where the coca produced goes primarily to the legal sector, suggesting that it is the accumulation of human capital specific to the illegal industry that fosters criminal careers. However, the rollout of a conditional cash transfer program that encourages schooling mitigates the effects of exposure to illegal industries, providing further evidence on the mechanisms.

"To establish these results, I take advantage of drug enforcement policies in Colombia that shifted coca leaf production to Peru, where 90% of coca production is used to produce cocaine. In particular, in 1999, Colombia, then the world’s largest cocaine producer, implemented Plan Colombia, a U.S.-supported military-based interdiction intervention.One of the main components was the aerial spraying of coca crops in Colombia. This intervention resulted in higher prices and expanded coca production in Peru, where production doubled in districts with the optimal agroecological conditions.2 By 2012, Peru had become the largest producer of cocaine in the world.3 

"This setting yields three useful sources of variation: (i) geographic variation in coca growing  in  Peru,  (ii)  over  time  variation  in  coca  prices  induced  by  Colombian  shocks, and (iii) variation in the age of exposure, exploiting the fact that in Peru children are more  likely  to  drop  out  from  school  in  the  transition  between  primary  and  secondary education at the ages 11–14. I thus define age-specific shocks by interacting coca suitability measures and prices. Differential exposure by age arises since children within a district or village experience the changes in coca prices at different ages and due to variation in coca suitability across districts, villages, and schools."