Economist Writing Every Day

Jingi Qui, Tan Chen, Alain Cohn, and Alvin Roth ran a cool field experiment asking the question: does it matter if a prominent economist quote tweets your job market paper? Well, it turns out, yes, it does:

I’m not going to call anyone out, but there was definitely some significant pearl clutching about young careers, IRB, and did the job candidates in the control group give permission to not be retweeted by a prominent economist. I do not care about any of that. I’ll go on the record and say that a) I believe those concerns to be silly and b) if you don’t think they are silly, for your own mental health don’t start digging into how medical science is advanced at the stage of human trials.

What I do care about is the results and what they mean. All publicity is good publicity, doubly so when it implies a famous person has vouched for your paper. It’s the vouching that intrigues me because it’s so weak. It’s a retweeting. It should help you get out of a pile and into a slightly smaller pile. In a job market with a 500-1000 applicants for most positions and only 10-20 first interview slots that lead to 4-7 flyouts, the effect should be trivial. Twenty-five percent additional flyouts is not trivial. If anything it’s catastropic.

“Catastropic” is hyperbole, but this is a blog and that is the currency we deal in.

Twenty-five percent more flyouts are, to me, further evidence of the true source of most of the pathologies of academic economics: we’re overcommitted. We don’t have time to do things like reading papers. This is especially problematic for hiring committees tasked with sorted through 500 to 1000 applicants, each of whom has written a job paper. Careful, dear reader, because you might not like how far this logic can take you.

Why do journal reviews feel so capricious and random? Because the referees don’t have time to read anything or they won’t have time to work on their own submissions. Why does the NBER essentially operate as a club whose principal membership mechanism whether you are a student of a current member at a top 10 school? Because what else are they going to do, read 2000 applicant CVs every year? Why does a three-three teaching load feel utterly damning to those trying to start a research career? Because they marginal cost of additional teaching for someone without any research assistance leaves them a simple choice: no sleep or no research. Do I even have to get into the costs of having children early in careers?

So yeah, if I’m on a hiring committee and someone famous retweets your job market paper, I might just skim it there and then on my computer screen (it’s low marginal cost). It’s there in front of me, so I’ll probably more than read the abstract, I’ll skim the tables and figures too. And that’s all it takes. I’ve got a mandate to come up with a list of 10 candidates I think we should consider interviewing. Who am I to disagree with Famous Economist X when a moment’s humility will put me 10% closer to meeting my obligation?

I’m not saying we’re not star-f…..I’m not saying we’re not status seekers, it’s just that the obsession with status in academia is inframarginal in this context. What’s driving these results is stressed-out folks whose own imposter syndrome makes them incredibly vulnerable to any sort of low-cost information i.e. advertising that offers a new and easy way to economize on their time.

That’s it, that’s the post. I don’t have time to come up with a clever ending.