Class Project: Network Analysis of Economics PhD Programs Placement

Abstract

The central goal of this project is to inform prospective applicants to economics PhD programs with empirical strategies and insights by analyzing the economics job market from 2010 to 2017. Also, it analyzes the network behind the academic placements by measuring the trend, densities, centralities, divisions. However, it also acknowledge the potential limitations in the data and analysis.

There are several next steps for this project. Firstly, I will look further at the non-academic placements and find its relationship with the academic placements. Secondly, I will provide a new measure for the variance among placements from the same programs. Thirdly, I will combine all these new measures and make an interactive web application, so that users could adjust their weights for different variables and get a personalized recommendation list of programs to make better choices.

Links

Access my current draft here

Access my Python code using Networkx here

Visualization

Placement network of Top 100 US Economics PhD Programs: