AEA Survey of hiring plans of U.S. Economics Departments (and an unrelated unprecedented AEA announcement about Larry Summers)

 Here's the latest survey of the job market for new PhD economists:

To: Members of the American Economic Association
From: AEA Committee on the Job Market: John Cawley (chair), Elisabeth “Bitsy” Perlman, Al 
Roth, Peter Rousseau, Wendy Stock, and Stephen Wu
Date: December 1, 2025
Re: Survey of hiring plans of U.S. Economics Departments 

 

 

 

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Also on the AEA website is this unprecedented announcement:

    Announcement      December 2, 2025

Statement from the American Economic Association

"The American Economic Association (AEA) has accepted Lawrence H. Summers' voluntary resignation from membership and, pursuant to the AEA's Policies, Procedures, and Code of Professional Conduct, has imposed a lifetime ban on his membership. In addition, effective immediately, the AEA has imposed a lifetime prohibition on Mr. Summers' attending, speaking at, or otherwise participating in AEA-sponsored events or activities, including serving in any editorial or refereeing capacity for AEA journals. The AEA condemns Mr. Summers' conduct, as reflected in publicly reported communications, as fundamentally inconsistent with its standards of professional integrity and with the trust placed in mentors within the economics profession. Consistent with longstanding AEA practices and to protect the integrity and confidentiality of AEA processes, the AEA will not comment further on individual matters or the specific considerations underlying this determination.

The AEA is committed to upholding the highest standards of professional conduct and to fostering a safe, respectful, and inclusive environment for all members of the economics community.  The AEA affirms its expectation that all members adhere to the AEA Code of Professional Conduct and the AEA Policy on Harassment, Discrimination, and Retaliation, and remains dedicated to maintaining professional environments in which economists of all backgrounds can participate fully, and with dignity and respect."

 
 

Congestion and signaling in the job market, as the ratio of applications to positions continues to rise

 Aki Ito, at Business Insider, writes about how the number of job applications per position is growing, and how there's some exploratory use of signaling of interest through job sites that allow a small number of such signals.

How tech broke the job market
Applying to a job in 2025 is the statistical equivalent of hurling your resume into a black hole. By Aki Ito

"To see how bad it's gotten, I asked Greenhouse, one of the leading providers of hiring software, to take a look at their data. Last quarter, the average job opening received 242 applications — nearly triple the amount in 2017, when the unemployment rate was at a comparable level.

 

"Nobody's happy with the current situation," says Greenhouse CEO Daniel Chait. "Something broke in the technology." 

"This isn't the first time a market's grown so overcrowded it stopped functioning. Economists even have a name for it: congestion. Big markets hold the promise of creating better matches, but they also tend to devolve into total chaos.

"Congestion is the bane of a lot of markets," says Alvin Roth, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Stanford who's helped design programs to better match students with schools, organ donors with patients, and hospitals with new doctors. "Successful marketplaces have to fight hard to defeat congestion."

...

"The forces that make it cheap to send more applications are working faster than the forces that allow you to quickly process many applications," says Roth. "We're deep into congestion."

...

[There is] "a new website where candidates can manage their applications to Greenhouse's clients. There, it introduced a feature called Dream Job, which lets people mark one application a month as a job they especially want. The idea is that recruiters don't just want qualified applicants. They want to know — amid the sea of people applying with a single click — who's actually serious enough that they'd likely accept an offer.

"Online daters might recognize the concept as the "rose" on Hinge or the "super like" on Tinder — gestures borrowed from a landmark study in market design. Dream Job launched in June, and the early data is promising: Employers have been five times more likely to hire Dream Job applicants than standard ones.

"Other intermediaries of the job market are trying their own fixes. LinkedIn, for instance, introduced its own "rose," called Top Choice, to its premium members (Top Choice candidates, the platform says, are 43% more likely to get a recruiter message). It also shows people whether they're a high, medium, or low match for the roles they view ("try exploring other jobs," it gently advises low-match candidates). And this year it's been testing daily limits on Easy Apply submissions."
 

Physicians are now more likely employed than in private practice, and AMA membership has correspondingly declined

 Medpage Today has the story:

Medical Societies Are Facing an Existential Crisis
— It's time to adapt to the employed physician era
by Hemant Kalia MD, MPH, Mark Adams, MD, MBA, and David Jakubowicz, MD 

 

"According to the American Medical Association (AMA), 2020 marked the first time that fewer than half (49.1%) of physicians worked in doctor-owned practices since their tracking began. By 2022, that number had fallen further to 46.7%, down from 60% a decade earlier. Meanwhile, the share of physicians employed by hospitals and health systems has expanded sharply -- from about 29% of physicians in 2012 to more than 40% in 2022. Private equity ownership, virtually absent in previous decades, now accounts for roughly 5% of physician employment. 

...

" this employment transformation has disrupted the very institutions meant to represent physicians. Nationally, AMA membership has plunged from about 75% of U.S. physicians in the 1950s to just 15% today. State and county medical societies mirror this pattern, facing shrinking memberships, aging leadership, and limited engagement among younger doctors.

"Specialty societies have filled much of that vacuum. Groups like the American College of Physicians, the American College of Surgeons, and the American Academy of Family Physicians have seen significant growth over the past few decades. 

Job market advice for new Ph.D. economists, from John Cawley

 From applying for jobs, to signaling for interviews,  through interviews, flyouts, offers and the scramble, John Cawley, the chair of the American Economic Association's Committee on the Job Market has measured advice in this video.  If you're on the market this year, do yourself a favor (pour a stiff drink) and listen, not just to the beginning discussion of disruptions in demand thisyear, but to the whole thing.

    
2025 Webinar on the Economics PhD Job Market 

Remote work and reproduction

 Here's a recent paper indicating that work from home (WFH) may increase fertility, particularly when both partners in a household work from home. The paper suggests that this may be because WFH makes childcare easier. (I'd be glad to see if the effect holds for same-sex couples, as a control for an alternative hypothesis about the mechanism at work.)

Work from Home and Fertility
by Cevat Giray Aksoy, Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, Katelyn Cranney, Steven J. Davis, Mathias Dolls and Pablo Zarate
27 August 2025
 

Abstract: "We establish a positive relationship between work from home (WFH) and fertility, drawing on  our Global Survey of Working Arrangements (38 countries, N=19,241) and our U.S. Survey of  Working Arrangements and Attitudes (N=102,411). Respondents who WFH at least 1 day per  week had more biological children from 2021 to early 2025, and plan to have more children in  the future, compared to observationally similar persons who do not WFH. Respondents whose  spouse or domestic partner works from home also report higher recent and planned fertility. When both partners WFH at least one day per week, our results suggest that total lifetime  fertility is greater by 0.2 children in our global sample (0.18 in our US sample), as compared  to couples where neither partner engages in any WFH. We find qualitatively similar patterns in  our Asian subsample (N= 4,323), but some results are statistically insignificant for Asian  women. WFH is also less common in Asia. Taken together, these findings suggest that current  WFH levels have only small positive effects on fertility in Asia. "

  "Tensions between women’s career goals and childcare responsibilities, and other tradeoffs between fertility and lifestyles for women and men, are a key focus of recent research. Doepke et al. 2023 offers a recent review. Flexibility about when, where, and how to work –or the absence of such flexibility – is one potentially important factor in fertility decisions (Goldin 2014, 2021). Paid work from home (WFH) often brings greater flexibility in these respects, perhaps making it easier and less costly for actual and prospective parents to combine child rearing with employment"

Congestion in the job market, AI version

 The Atlantic has this story on the job market, that contains a nice line...

The Job Market Is Hell.  Young people are using ChatGPT to write their applications; HR is using AI to read them; no one is getting hired.   By Annie Lowrey

“ What Bumble and Hinge did to the dating market, contemporary human-resources practices have done to the job market. People are swiping like crazy and getting nothing back.”

Congestion in online labor markets: too many applications

 As online job ads make it easier to submit chatbot-assisted applications, companies are becoming overwhelmed.

The WSJ has this story:

How to Navigate the Jungle of Online Job Postings
Companies are rethinking online job applications, seeking quality over quantity  By Callum Borchers

"You probably haven’t looked for a job in a newspaper’s classified pages since the Bush administration—possibly the first one. It could be worth reviving this old-school strategy because many of the listings offer a way to bypass those dreaded online application portals.

...

"Companies fed up with the low-quality, sometimes fraudulent submissions that flood applicant-tracking systems are reaching back in time for hard-to-hack recruiting methods. Classified ads are just one tack.

"Others include: leaning harder on references; making application forms so cumbersome that only serious candidates will complete them; and posting openings on niche job boards instead of the most popular ones."

American doctors moving to Canada

 Many Canadian doctors practice in the U.S., where pay is generally higher and they may have more access to high tech imaging and other medical equipment.  But there's a stream of docs moving in the other direction now.

KFF Health news has the story:

American Doctors Are Moving to Canada To Escape the Trump Administration
By Brett Kelman 

"The Medical Council of Canada said in an email statement that the number of American doctors creating accounts on physiciansapply.ca, which is “typically the first step” to being licensed in Canada, has increased more than 750% over the past seven months compared with the same time period last year — from 71 applicants to 615. Separately, medical licensing organizations in Canada’s most populous provinces reported a rise in Americans either applying for or receiving Canadian licenses, with at least some doctors disclosing they were moving specifically because of Trump.

...

"Doctors Manitoba, which represents physicians in the rural province that struggles with one of Canada’s worst doctor shortages, launched a recruiting campaign after the election to capitalize on Trump and the rise of far-right politics in the U.S.

"The campaign focuses on Florida and North and South Dakota and advertises “zero political interference in physician patient relationship” as a selling point."

Healthcare as a modern jobs engine, by Gottlieb, Mahoney, Rinz and Udalova

Here's a paper with cheerful results about employment and wages in health care.

Rise of Healthcare Jobs  by Joshua D. Gottlieb, Neale Mahoney, Kevin Rinz, and Victoria Udalova, NBER Working Paper No. 33583  March 2025

ABSTRACT: "Healthcare employment has grown more than twice as fast as the labor force since 1980, overtaking retail trade to become the largest industry by employment in 2009. We document key facts about the rise of healthcare jobs. Earnings for healthcare workers have risen nearly twice as fast as those in other industries, with relatively large increases in the middle and upper-middle parts of the earnings distribution. Healthcare workers have remained predominantly female, with increases in the share of female doctors offsetting increases in the shares of male nurses and aides. Despite a few high-profile examples to the contrary, regions experiencing manufacturing job losses have not systematically reinvented themselves by pivoting from ``manufacturing to meds.'' 

...

"In 2006, healthcare overtook manufacturing in terms of employment, and in 2009 healthcare overtook retail trade to become the largest industry by employment in the U.S. 

...

"We show that employment growth has been fairly uniform across most clinical occupations. The exception is a new category known as midlevels, which includes physician assistants and nurse practitioners. This category—which was too small to be consistently measured prior to 2010—has more than doubled since 2010, growing from 227,000 to 505,000 workers. As of 2022, there were more midlevels than primary care physicians, and midlevels provided more than half of primary care services in the U.S. (HRSA, 2023).

"This healthcare employment growth was accompanied by strong earnings growth, especially for nurses and midlevels in the middle and upper-middle parts of the clinical occupational distribution. Specifically, earnings grew nearly twice as fast for healthcare workers as for non-healthcare workers from 1980 to 2022; during this window, average healthcare earnings rose from 4% below to over 14% above the average for non-healthcare workers. While the top percentile of the wage distribution has fared better outside of healthcare, healthcare wages have grown faster for the rest of the distribution, and are particularly strong between the middle and the 95th percentiles. Indeed, with strong employment growth and earnings growth that outpaced the rest of the economy outside the very top, it is reasonable to conclude that healthcare has been a modern middle-class “jobs engine.”

 

 "The descriptive analysis in this paper offers three key findings about the rise of healthcare jobs: the relatively strong growth of earnings in the middle and upper-middle parts of the distribution, including for nurses and midlevels; the partial convergence in gender ratios across clinical occupations; and the scant evidence of a systematic manufacturing-to-meds transition, despite high-profile examples."

Will artificial intelligence disrupt labor markets as much as electricity and computers have?

 Here's a paper that takes a long view of American occupations (and concludes that it's too early to tell about ai...)

TECHNOLOGICAL DISRUPTION IN THE LABOR MARKET by David J. Deming, Christopher Ong, and Lawrence H. Summers, NBER Working Paper 33323 , January 2025, http://www.nber.org/papers/w33323 

ABSTRACT: This paper explores past episodes of technological disruption in the US labor market, with the goal of learning lessons about the likely future impact of artificial intelligence (AI). We measure changes in the structure of the US labor market going back over a century. We find, perhaps surprisingly, that the pace of change has slowed over time. The years spanning 1990 to 2017 were less disruptive than any prior period we measure, going back to 1880. This comparative decline is not because the job market is stable today but rather because past changes were so profound. General-purpose technologies (GPTs) like steam power and electricity dramatically disrupted the twentieth-century labor market, but the changes took place over decades. We argue that AI could be a GPT on the scale of prior disruptive innovations, which means it is likely too early to assess its full impacts. Nonetheless, we present four indications that the pace of labor market change has accelerated recently, possibly due to technological change. First, the labor market is no longer polarizing-- employment in low- and middle-paid occupations has declined, while highly paid employment has  grown. Second, employment growth has stalled in low-paid service jobs. Third, the share of  employment in STEM jobs has increased by more than 50 percent since 2010, fueled by growth in software and computer-related occupations. Fourth, retail sales employment has declined by 25 percent in the last decade, likely because of technological improvements in online retail. The postpandemic labor market is changing very rapidly, and a key  question is whether this faster pace of change will persist into the future.