Job market papers of 2017-2018

As you may have noticed, I’ve been surveying various job market papers from this year.  So far, here are my subjective impressions of what is going on overall.  The number of money and macro papers is way down.  Development economics is still flourishing and expanding, even relative to a few years ago, though I worry I am not seeing many generalizable results and that the fixed costs of continuing to do this kind of research throughout your career are quite high.  Purely applied areas such as water and transportation are making their way into job market papers at the top schools.  MIT and Harvard are still the two best graduate programs with the best students.  Papers from business and public policy schools, on the technical side, are coming closer and closer to economics, and they may be more interesting, so consider those places for your hiring.  I’m seeing Turkish, Korean, and Chinese graduate students working on the big picture institutional and political economy questions.  The total number of candidates seemed slightly down, though that could be my imagination.