have provided us with a wealth of information about the newest products of U.S. Ph.D. programs. Among the notable facts are the continuing decline in the share of U.S. natives among these new graduates, their continued success at landing academic and other professional jobs, and their high level of professional fulfillment, in terms of both job satisfaction and outcomes measuring up to expectations. There are also a variety of intriguing results. For example, (from their table 5) students completing the top Ph.D. programs were younger, less likely to be married, and more likely to be foreign than those in the overall sample. Perhaps most disturbing, (from their table 6) median starting full-time academic salaries were lowest in public economics, a result that cannot be accounted for in salary regressions with other covariates. This clearly is an inversion of the appropriate ranking. In my comments, I will focus on two selected aspects of Ph.D. programs and the Ph.D. job market.

We examine changes in subjective probabilities regarding retirement between the 2006 and 2008 waves of the Health and Retirement Study. Using a first-difference approach to eliminate individual heterogeneity, we find that the steep drop in asset prices in 2008 increased the reported probability of working at age 62 during the Great Recession. Increasing unemployment at least partly attenuated this effect, but subjective probabilities of working did not respond to changes in housing markets. Older workers' probabilities of working were more sensitive to fluctuations in the stock market, but less responsive to changes in labor market conditions.