The evolution of the economics job market

In the halcyon days of 2015-19, openings on the economics job market hovered at around 1900 per year. In 2020, Covid was a major shock, but the market bounced back quickly in 2021 and 2022. Since then, though, the market has clearly been in a funk. 2023, my job market year, saw a sudden dip in postings. 2024 was even worse, with openings falling 16% lower than the 2015-19 average.

At the time, the sudden fall in 2023 seemed mysterious—it was an otherwise healthy year for the broader labor market. In hindsight, it seems like the 2021-22 recovery masked some underlying weakness. The 2020 job market had 500 fewer openings than the 2014-19 average; 2021 and 2022 together produced only around 100 more jobs than the 2014-19 average. In other words, the recovery never made up for the pandemic; by this crude logic, around 400 economist jobs were “destroyed”.

…And of course, all of this decline occurred before the litany of disasters that have recently hit the Econ job market. In May, Jerome Powell announced that the Federal Reserve—perhaps the largest employer of economists in America—would cut its workforce by 10%. The federal government has frozen hiring, as has the World Bank. Hit by the dual threat of fines and looming cuts to federal funding, Harvard, MIT, the University of Washington, Notre Dame, Northwestern University, among others, have announced hiring freezes and budget cuts.

Here is more from Oliver Kim, who also offers a much broader discussion of the meaning of all this.