AEA

The re-Americanization of the American Economic Association Meetings

Joy Buchanan1 Comment

According to a chart circulating this week, attendance at the AEA winter meeting exceeded 13,000 economists at the peak. I had some job interviews at Chicago in 2017, and I spoke on a panel at San Diego in 2020. Chicago was freezing cold. San Diego was lovely in January. Cold or not, probably every economist on the job market showed up in person to those conferences. There are harrowing stories of people who missed job interviews because of snow and cancelled flights.

In 2020 (just before Covid) I wrote:

A privilege of being in this profession is the chance to meet people from around the world. At my lunch table currently there are people from Chile and Southern China to my right and Kansas and Hong Kong to my left. #ASSA2020

It is (or was) a huge win for the US to be the meeting place. Now that job interviews have moved to Zoom, attendance has fallen by more than half. I assume that the attendees here in 2024 skew more America-based.

A European economist predicts attendance in 2024 will fall even lower because “the interview stage of the market has moved online, and at a random date between October and January. No point in flying to ASSA, especially if you are a candidate based in Europe hoping for a job in Europe”

Instead of asking why the economics job market unraveled, maybe we should be surprised that it was ever so centralized. People really did travel from all over the world to an American city in January to interview for almost every serious job available in the economics profession.

Small points:

  • I’ve seen several people complain that it’s a bad time of year. For me, it’s a good time of year. Since I do a lot of teaching, it’s good to have a conference that happens before my teaching starts.
  • I was happy to see that childcare is available here (for a fee).
  • I talked to a job market candidate who was trying to weigh a tenure-track job offer from a teaching school against the possible offer of a postdoc. He would prefer the postdoc. Because of the new system, job offers come in sequence. He risks losing the teaching offer before he finds out if he will get the postdoc offer in writing. In the old days, candidates would have been more likely to know what their best option was going to be.
  • The online JOE job board still serves for coordination. It is still administered by the AEA for jobs globally.
  • James provided evidence that the AEA will start letting more people get on the program to present research. (By contrast, the Southern Economic Association meeting has actually increased in attendance since Covid. They allow accept more people to present research on the program.)
  • When my grad school research group went out for lunch, I was sometimes the only American at the table. I loved it. I’m grateful that those brilliant people came here to start their careers.

ASSA 2024: Unrejected

James Bailey2 Comments

Is this the year the world’s largest economics conference settles into its new normal? ASSA 2024 starts in San Antonio today.

Like most conferences, the Allied Social Science Association took a big hit during the pandemic. Unlike most other conferences, a big fraction of this hit appears to be permanent. Part of what made ASSA so popular was that it was the site of most 1st-round job interviews for economists, but the pandemic made this shift to remote interviews. The American Economic Association decided the job market was better that way, so they made the arrangement permanent.

This shrunk their conference by about half compared to pre-2020; overall I thought it was still fine last year, but that the transition creates a problem:

The big problem with attendance falling to 6k is that they’ve planned years worth of meetings with the assumption of 12k+ attendance. Getting one year further from Covid and dropping mask and vaccine mandates might help some, but the core issue is that 1st-round job interviews have gone remote and aren’t coming back. The best solution I can think of is raising the acceptance rate for papers, which in recent history has been well under 20%.

I suspect the AEA is starting to take my advice. Acceptance rates ticked up slightly in 2023 (from 7% to 9% for individual papers, and from 16% to 30% for complete sessions). They have yet to release full information on acceptance rates this year, but my own experience indicates that this summer they realized they had a problem. I got a rejection email in July that said:

We were able to accept less than one third of the more than 1,150 submissions for paper or poster sessions.

This was followed by something I’ve never seen from an economics conference before- a rejection of the rejection:

You have probably already received an email saying your paper which you submitted for the American Economic Association program at the meeting in San Antonio, TX in January 2024 was not accepted. However, the AEA has decided to select a few more papers for the poster session.

I am pleased to inform you that your paper entitled

Certificate of Need and Self-Employment


which you submitted for the American Economic Association program, has been selected to be part of the AEA’s poster session.

This sums up my relationship to the core of the profession nicely: I’m exactly on the margin of it. But this time, just barely on the right side of it, helping them fill up a newly-oversized hotel block.

The odds aren’t what they were in the mega-conference days before 2020, but I expect I’ll still see some of you in San Antonio.