Job Market

BLS is slowly (actually, it probably feels very quick for those working on it!) catching up on data releases that were delayed during the federal government shutdown. This week, we saw the release of the November jobs report, which also includes data from October, even though there was no separate release for October. Well, kinda.

For the household survey (which is used to calculate the unemployment rate, among many other measures of the labor market), there is no October report. Because there is no data to be collected. Look at Table A in the employment situation report, and you will see no data in the column for October 2025. Look at the FRED page for the unemployment rate, and you will notice a gap in October. As I wrote a few weeks ago, this is not the end of the world, but it is rather sad for a gap to show up in a series that consistently ran for 933 months back to 1948.

So what is in the jobs report? Lots of new information. A few related areas that have gotten a lot of attention this week are the changes in federal government employment vs. private sector employment, and the changes in native-born vs. foreign-born employment.

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When I was on the job market in 2014, everyone thought that it was terrible to be a theorist. The profession has moved dramatically toward empirical work, so all the hiring was there. But lots of new PhDs were still doing theory, so the supply of theorists exceeded demand and they had a hard time finding jobs.

My school is hiring in Game Theory / Industrial Organization this year, and based on my previous experience I expected a flood of applications from theorists- but it never arrived. We got substantially fewer applications than when we hired in Applied Micro a couple years ago, and even in the applications we did get, lots were out-of-field or doing empirical IO. I think we will still be able to hire well, I’m certainly happy with the three candidates we are flying out, but there is a lot less depth than I expected. It seems that PhD students have got the message that the demand for theorists is low, and so not many choose theory anymore.

I haven’t been able to find great data to either confirm or rebut my impressions; the closest is the data from this 2019 report with a low response rate. There is no “theory” field in it but I think the closest proxies are “Math & Quantitative Methods” and “Microeconomics”, which collectively made up 20% of demand but only 14% of supply.

I’d be interested to hear what everyone else has seen recently- is doing economic theory once again a sane career move?