The top young 'star' economists represent the future leaders of the discipline. Understanding where they are coming from, what they are studying, and where they are going to, is therefore important. This 2019 article by Kevin Bryan (University of Toronto), published in the journal Economic Inquiry (ungated version here), provides a look at the 'young stars' in economics over the period from 2013 to 2018 (who are mostly likely to be newly tenured professors now, in 2025). [*]
Bryan focuses his sample of top economists, defined by those who received multiple 'flyouts' for academic job interviews at top universities, between 2013 and 2018. As he explains:
While applications and interviews are largely nonpublic, flyouts are often publicly posted on department seminar lists, and accepted offers are of course publicly viewable on the hired student’s vita... This suggests two possible definitions of a “star”: those who accept top offers, and those who are flown out to top places. The problem with the former is that one of the questions we would like to answer is where top students take jobs, and using the job accepted as a definition begs the question.
For this reason, our definition of a star is any economist within 8 years of beginning their PhD, who has never had a permanent job after graduating, and who has received a sufficiently large number of high quality flyouts... We begin with a list of the top 25 U.S. economics PhD programs in the U.S. News 2013 rankings, then add eight top business schools which frequently hire economists in nonfinance positions, Harvard Kennedy’s policy program, and 10 European and Canadian programs which regularly fly out top junior candidates.6 For each of these 44 programs, we gathered flyout lists from departmental seminar websites each year between 2013 and 2018, and augmented these with e-mail requests to departments which do not post flyouts publicly... We then assign consistent weights to a flyout at each program, with more prestigious flyouts receiving more weight, and consider a star any student who receives sufficiently many weighted flyouts...
This results in a sample of 226 'young stars' in economics, and Bryan summarises where those students are from, what they have been doing, and where they ultimately went to, using data collected from the students' CVs, job market papers, and LinkedIn. First, in terms of background, Bryan reports that:
The 226 star students come from 40 countries, of which 35% are American, 35.4% are European, and the remainder are from the rest of the world.
Notably, there was one student from New Zealand in Bryan's sample. I wish I knew who it was, but honestly, I have no idea! Then, in terms of where they graduated, Bryan notes that:
While the national origins of star students are diverse... the PhD program diversity of students is less so. Totally 47% of star students come from only five PhD programs, and 84.5% came from only 11 universities, including students from all programs at those schools. Only 9.3% of stars—21 total—did their PhD outside the United States.
Those top five PhD programmes were MIT (31 students out of 226), Harvard (25), Princeton (18), Yale (16), and Stanford (15). The highest non-US institution is London School of Economics, with eight students. Turning to gender, Bryan reports that:
...only 20.4% of star students are female, a percentage never exceeding 25% in any of the 6 years in our sample.
This is not great news, although Bryan notes first that this reflects the pipeline at top universities:
In the 2018 cohort, among the 11 programs that historically produce the most star students, there are 187 men and 50 women listed on those programs’ job market websites. That is, only 21.1% are female.
Bryan then notes in a footnote that:
Although 2019 data is preliminary at publication time, and hence not included in the overall analysis, there is a stark difference in that cohort: 20 of 43 stars, or 46.5%, are female.
So, perhaps there is some evidence of a balancing of genders in top programmes, and among 'young stars', although we would need more than just one year of data to support that conclusion. Moving on to the question of what 'young stars' study, Bryan finds that:
...the most striking fact is that job market stars almost universally studied economics or a technical field as their undergraduate degree... Over 75% of all job market stars have an undergraduate degree in economics, and nearly 95% have an undergraduate degree in either economics or a technical subject (mathematics, statistics, operations research, physics, or engineering).
That might be a striking fact, but not at all surprising. Interestingly though, there are different pathways to the PhD for American and non-American stars:
...34% complete their PhD within 6 years of their first tertiary degree. Americans are slightly more likely to do so, and men as well, though the differences are statistically insignificant... the reasons why Americans and non-Americans do not go straight from their undergraduate to PhD work are very different—Americans work, often as RAs, and non-Americans study at the master’s level—but the net effect is that both groups delay going “straight through” from undergraduate study at a similar rate.
In terms of field of study for their PhD job market paper, Bryan notes that:
...when we concatenate subfields into the broad categories of “applied micro,” “macro,” and “micro and econometric theory,” applied micro is the primary field of 45.6% of stars. There is no time trend...
There are large differences in field between male and female stars. Over 67% of female stars have applied micro as their primary field; only 40% of men have the same (Fisher exact test: p < .005). This difference is largely driven by the overrepresentation of women among stars in development and labor. On the other hand, in the broad definition of macroeconomics, in which we include growth, monetary, pure macroeconomics, finance, international and political economy, there were only seven female stars over 6 years, representing barely 10% of macro stars in that period.
This gender difference in areas of specialisation within economics is well known (for example, see here). However, I thought this bit was surprising:
Publications prior to the job market are not a necessary condition for stars... 51% have a publication or an R&R [Revise and Resubmit]... That said, the flip side of this statistic is that half of job market stars have no publication or R&R at all, and 80% do not have a top five publication or R&R.
That really does mean that 'young stars' are being hired on the strength of their networks, and whatever they can convey through an interview process, rather than the signal provided by high-quality publications. And:
Looking at heterogeneity in publishing, female stars are 32% less likely to have a publication or R&R than men (Fisher exact test: p < .05).
That result is interesting, and I'm unsure how to interpret it alongside the other gender differences. Could this simply reflect that female economists take longer to get published (as this paper suggests)? Or that, among potential young stars with no publications, universities are more likely to flyout a promising female applicant? Either of those could be the case, and it would be interesting to see if this result holds up in more recent cohorts, and dig into what might explain it.
Finally, Bryan looks at where they 'young stars' go, reporting that:
A total of 64.2% of all stars take a job at a U.S. economics department, and 47% of stars go to the top 15 departments alone. Another 21.7% accept jobs at a U.S. business school, almost always at a top 10 school.
That is not surprising, although this may be:
The only star student in our sample who went to the private sector went as a postdoc, and has since returned to academia.
I suspect that more recent cohorts have larger numbers attracted to private sector tech jobs, although it is also possible that 'young stars' still have a strong preference for academia, and it is the next tier down of PhD graduates who end up in the private sector. And Bryan cites some research to support that interpretation. Finally, Bryan turns his attention to postdocs, noting that:
Fourteen students, or just over 5%, became a star on the market following a postdoc... That is, not only is it not necessary to do a postdoc before being competitive for top permanent jobs in economics, it is in fact rare to do so.
I found that quite interesting, and a little surprising that more students didn't use a postdoc as a 'finishing school' or a way of getting a head-start on publications before the tenure clock starts. Again, perhaps that is more of a feature for the next tier of PhD graduates, and the 'young stars' are less affected?
Anyway, these 'young star' economists will almost all now be tenured professors, and no doubt form the core of the next generation of 'senior star' economists. It would be interesting to see some follow-up research on more recent cohorts, especially to investigate whether there have been any changes in the gender balance and gender differences within these top emerging economists.
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[*] I'd love to argue that the six-year gap (which nicely aligns with the tenure clock) between publication and my reading of this article was purposeful. But really, as regular readers of this blog might have noticed, I'm running through a bunch of papers I set aside in 2019 to read, and never got to (thanks in large part to pandemic-related teaching workload).
