The market for Ph.D. econiomists has changed drastically in the last twenty years. During the 1960's there was a market with the number of Ph.D.s granted tripling, the salaries being received by new Ph.D.s rising by a third and the number of entering graduate students in economics rising by 2.6 times its 1960 level. Since the early 1970's there has been a decline in all of these variables. Other graduate fields experienced booms at roughly the same time as economics but the boom in economics has not been followed by a bust of the proportions seen in other fields (for example, see Richard Freeman, 1971). Nonetheless there has been a change in the nature of placement in the economics market. It is more difficult for candidates of given qualifications to obtain a desirable job, and the probability of being unemployed or underemployed at the time of receipt of the degree has increased. Many individuals who would have qualified for academic jobs at highly ranked institutions are now accepting nonacademic jobs or academic jobs at lower ranked institutions. In order to analyze these changes in the market for economists a two-pronged approach has been applied to the academic portion of the market. Although the analysis applies specifically to the academic portion of the market, the conclusions reached are more general, since the majority of economists work in academia. The discussion is divided into three major sections. The first presents the results of a cobweb analysis of the market, recognizing the inherent feedbacks in the market while ignoring quality variations in both jobs and applicants. The second section addresses the variations in quality. The third gives conclusions which can be drawn from the combination of the two approaches.

American Economic Association Universal Academic Questionnaire Summary Statistics by Charles E. Scott and John J. Siegfried. Published in volume 104, issue 5, pages 603-07 of American Economic Review, May 2014

American Economic Association Universal Academic Questionnaire Summary Statistics by Charles E. Scott and John J. Siegfried. Published in volume 102, issue 3, pages 631-34 of American Economic Review, May 2012

American Economic Association Universal Academic Questionnaire Summary Statistics by Charles E. Scott and John J. Siegfried. Published in volume 101, issue 3, pages 664-67 of American Economic Review, May 2011

American Economic Association Universal Academic Questionnaire Summary Statistics by Charles E. Scott and John J. Siegfried. Published in volume 100, issue 2, pages 647-50 of American Economic Review, May 2010

American Economic Association Universal Academic Questionnaire Summary Statistics by Charles E. Scott and John J. Siegfried. Published in volume 99, issue 2, pages 641-45 of American Economic Review, May 2009

American Economic Association Universal Academic Questionnaire Summary Statistics by Charles E. Scott and John J. Siegfried. Published in volume 98, issue 2, pages 630-33 of American Economic Review, May 2008

American Economic Association Universal Academic Questionnaire Summary Statistics by Charles E. Scott and John J. Siegfried. Published in volume 96, issue 2, pages 527-530 of American Economic Review, May 2006