3. The Structure of Economics PhD Programs

Let’s say that after careful thought and preparatory work, you decide to apply for a PhD program in economics, and you enroll in one. What can you expect in terms of the curriculum?

Economics is a discipline, just as physics and sociology and history are disciplines. As a discipline, economics is divided into many “fields,” or specialized areas of knowledge: macroeconomics, public economics, labor economics, and so on. (The specialized areas coincide with the codes developed by the AEA to classify research in economics.) Different departments offer and support different fields. You will generally be expected to work in a field at some point in your program. 

The typical program is five years; most students are given a sixth year, if they need it, and most do. 

Usually, before you even begin your first semester, you will be required to take a summer session on mathematics, to brush up on your algebra and calculus. Think of this as a math camp. In fact, that is what it’s usually called.

You will normally take two years of courses. Your first year will consist solely of theory and principles classes—so-called core courses. At the end of the year, you usually have to pass exams in order to continue in the program.

In your second year, you will take “field” courses—courses in health economics, in industrial organization, in public economics, in econometrics, and so forth, in which you’ll apply what you learned in your first year to economic problems. At the end of your second year you may have to pass field exams to continue in the program.

For most of you, that will be all the classes you take. From then on, you will not have the institutional rhythm and discipline that being enrolled in courses, seeing classmates regularly, and so on provide. For some of you, that will be difficult, dependent as you are on an externally imposed structure. If that is you, you’ll want to create a structure by meeting regularly with your adviser and establishing writing and research routines.

Toward the end of the second year, you will be expected to begin working on a paper of publishable or near-publishable quality, often known as the “second year” paper or “field” paper. For many of you, this might be the first serious writing you have done in some time—or the first serious writing you’ve done at all. The question is, Do you know how to write an economics paper? Do you know what kinds of information economics papers typically contain and how that information is arranged? I discuss some of this in the section on academic preparation. You may or may not receive explicit instruction on such things.

Once you have written your field paper, your third year will be spent developing and defending a dissertation “prospectus”—a plan for researching and completing your dissertation. You will then spend the next two to three years writing your dissertation. Then will come the dissertation defense. If you pass your defense, you will be a PhD.

With no more classes to take, you’ll be more or less on your own to develop your dissertation prospectus and write your dissertation. Of course, you’ll have an adviser, and together you’ll establish deadlines and the like. But your adviser isn’t going to do your work for you (nor should she), and he cannot force you to be productive. To that extent, you’ll be on your own.

Most departments have a regular series of lunch groups and the like at which people, sometimes from the department, sometimes from other universities, present work in progress. The groups are usually devoted to a particular field (labor, macroeconomics, IO, etc.). You should attend the groups that pertain to your research interests and volunteer to present your work two or three times a year.