Economics PhD programs in Europe: Completion times and job placement

Abstract

Stock, Finegan, and Siegfried establish that completion times in U.S. economics PhD programs have been on the rise, with the median steadily approaching six years. Do European programs experience the same trend? The authors of this article present new hand-collected data on job market candidates from the top European PhD programs in economics. In the past five years, completion times have been rising steadily, and the median is now approaching six years. Empirical evidence suggests that a shorter PhD duration is statistically associated with less prestigious placements. The authors further investigate how PhD duration and placement prestige vary with personal researcher characteristics such as gender or field of undergraduate studies.

Keywords:

• Completion times
• economics education
• Europe
• graduate studies
• job placement

JEL CODES:

• A11
• A23

Acknowledgment

The authors thank Matic Petricek for outstanding research assistance.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The opinions in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action.

2 This project started as an internal project at the European University Institute (EUI) during the period when all three authors were affiliated with the EUI. The objective was to understand the differences between the EUI Economics Doctoral Program and its closest competitors, in particular with regard to completion time. While such information was readily available for U.S. programs, we had to hand-collect information on European programs by going through the CVs of over 700 recent job market candidates. Subsequently, we realized that our findings could benefit the economics community at large, and therefore merit wider dissemination. The data are available from the authors upon request.

3 Because our analysis focuses on a subset of all European programs, with emphasis on including programs that resemble top U.S. programs in structure, our results should not be taken as representative of European economics PhD education more broadly.

4 For more information on the “economics job market,” visit https://www.econjobmarket.org/index.php. The organization describes itself as a “non-profit clearinghouse for applications to PhD level jobs in economics.”

5 The current ranking can be accessed via https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.inst.all.html. The ranking is updated continuously, so the current rankings might differ from the ones we used for our analysis.

6 The p-value associated with a two-tailed t-test for no difference in sample means, assuming unequal variance, is 0.53.

7 We also looked at the representation of women across fields. Female candidates are overrepresented in applied economics and underrepresented in econometrics. Consequently, we added interaction terms between gender and field to our ordered probit model for completion times. The resulting coefficients are not significantly different from zero. Finally, we added interaction terms between gender and institution. Except for two institutions, these are not significant either.

8 Few candidates complete their PhD in three years, which makes interpretation of the estimated probabilities for those subsamples difficult.

9 Few candidates place as assistant professors after a completing their PhD in four or less years, which makes interpretation of the estimated probabilities for those subsamples difficult.

10 For the full sample, including a quadratic term on completion time shows a diminishing relationship where longer completion times stop improving placement prestige around 6.4 years. For the assistant professor subsample, the quadratic relationship is convex, flat for completion times up to 5.5 years, and then a steeper effect of completion time on placement prestige.