Below is some advice I wrote as a contribution to the “Thriving in Economics” e-book series which you can find here: https://econ4ua.org/thriving-in-economics/. There are three books aimed at aspiring PhDs, current PhDs, and assistant professors (and beyond) chock-full of advice written by many economists with a variety of paths and viewpoints. You can buy a copy of these books for yourself, for others, or even sponsor a copy for someone else! All proceeds go towards humanitarian aid in Ukraine.
Introduction
McFall et al. (2015) analyze the 2007-2010 economics job market using surveys and data from job market websites. They find that only about 28% of job market candidates had a publication, although that share may be higher now. Is having a publication going to set you apart and improve your chances of a successful job market?
In my view, the answer is: typically, yes. But, there are still some tradeoffs and caveats to consider.
Publishing in Economics
I want to start by sketching out the publication process in economics, so we have a sense of the workload and timeline required to have a publication for the job market.
The publication process begins with the submission of a paper to a journal, which is then evaluated by an editor. Sometimes this results in a desk rejection (McKenzie (2020) shows that for several high profile development journals this ranges from around 40% to over 80% of submissions), and other times the paper will be sent to referees. Once the paper is with referees, it will likely take several months to hear back from the editor with a decision. That decision is most commonly going to be a rejection, as many journals in economics accept only about 10% of papers submitted, but could also be a request for revision and resubmission (the next most likely outcome), reject and resubmit (not every journal does this), or acceptance. In the event of a revise and resubmit, after the authors respond to the referees and have resubmitted the paper, it is typically sent back to referees and the process repeats. The number of rounds for revisions varies across journals, as does the likelihood of a rejection conditional on being given a revise and resubmit decision.
The publication process in economics is quite slow. Hadavand et al. (forthcoming) note that for the top 5 economics journals the average time from submission to acceptance was 2 years in 2012-2013. It is also important to remember that this is for articles that were ultimately accepted. It is common to submit a paper to multiple journals, which could add a substantial amount of time. But let’s take this 2 years as a rough guide. This means that to have a publication by the time you are on the market in, say, year 5, you need to have it ready to submit in the fall of year 3. And if you follow the advice of Pischke (2019), it should take around 6 months to get a draft (we might add some time to account for learning by doing; polishing the paper before submitting; or presenting it at some workshops/conferences, but for now I’ll ignore that aspect), which brings us to sometime during the spring of year 2 to start this paper. If you are aiming for a year 6 market, then you have a little more leeway here.
Considerations
First and foremost, whether you should publish during graduate school depends on the quality of the journal that you are publishing in. There are many predatory journals out there that ask you to pay in order to publish and still others that may email you asking for contributions–avoid these journals. The goal of publishing during graduate school is to send a signal to departments that you are capable and can publish in high-quality journals with peer review. High-quality doesn’t have to be “top 5” or top field, but the signal the publication sends will be interpreted differently based on where it was published and who is doing the interpreting.
Secondly, whether you should publish during graduate school depends on the preferences you have for where you would like to end up. Said another way, who are you publishing for? Different types of departments (economics, policy school, business school, liberal arts college, non-economics) and non-academic organizations will value not only publications themselves differently, but also value different journals and types of journals differently. For example, a liberal arts college may not place much weight on publications because of their emphasis on teaching (this is not universally true). Similarly, a publication in a multi-disciplinary journal may not be valued by an economics department at all. Thinking about where you might like to end up also includes evaluating the likely tenure or promotion requirements and how likely it is you can meet them. This then ties into how the signal of publishing in a particular journal will be interpreted. For example, if you’re aiming for a top department, publishing in a third-tier journal is likely to send a negative signal.
Thirdly, whether you should publish during graduate school does not have a clear “yes” or “no” answer because of tradeoffs and opportunity costs (would we be economists without them?). If you are one year or less away from your job market, you should likely be working on your job market paper full time (a sentiment echoed by Chris Blattman, for example https://chrisblattman.com/blog/2022/04/16/managing-the-academic-job-market/). The opportunity cost of spending time on a project that isn’t your job market paper is incredibly high and most of the attention during your market will be on your job market paper.
One good strategy for your dissertation work I have heard is to begin by working on higher risk projects that carry higher rewards (e.g. a project that has a chance of disrupting your field or landing a top 5 publication down the line but that comes with risks like securing funding, gaining access to proprietary data, or running a large scale experiment). These high-risk projects are started early in order to allow time to pivot to something feasible and ensure the candidate has a job market paper for the year they are on the market. But, time spent working on a paper with the aim to publish it for the market means that you have less time for the high-risk project. So, if your preferences for where you’d like to end up heavily feature locations that require top 5 publications, the opportunity cost of pursuing something that is publishable in time for the market may be very steep. Starting with the highest-risk projects is more likely to be an approach at top institutions (at least that is the context where I discovered it).
If, however, you are coming from an institution that does not have an extensive record of placing graduates in the places you would like to end up, it may be a very good strategy to use a publication to help make up for that weaker institutional signal. Personally, this is the approach that my advisor and I sat down and discussed.
Perhaps a more common approach to working on your dissertation is that offered by Steve Pischke, “You should from very early on work on a concrete project (i.e. something with the potential to lead to a research paper), however modest” (Pischke (2019), p. 2). In this case, the opportunity cost of attempting to publish is lower and, after discussing it with your advisor and committee, I would recommend pursuing publication if it seems feasible to publish in a high-quality journal. If this happens to be your first chapter, great! If it’s your second chapter, just be cautious that the time commitment to the revision process doesn’t interfere with your job market paper and preparation.
It is also important to note that the opportunity cost can be potentially reduced by working with your advisor or other coauthors (especially experienced ones) on the paper you intend to publish for the market, as coauthors reduce the time you need to spend on the paper (this is also a great way to learn some of the hidden curriculum surrounding the publication process like how to respond to reviewers). However, there are also tradeoffs here as some institutions may discount the contribution of a graduate student on a paper with (especially more established) coauthors.
A last point is that it is not always guaranteed that anything you publish prior to starting a position will be considered for tenure and promotion. If you have publications when you go on the market, it might be a good idea to ask about this and check whether this is something you could negotiate if you (hopefully!) receive an offer. This is especially important for those who are looking to use publications prior to the market to jump start their tenure file.
Wrapping Up
For most of us, publishing is about sending a signal to prospective employers that we know what we’re doing and are capable. For those who have certain preferences, pedigrees, or who are close to the job market that signal may be less important or the opportunity cost may be very high. Publishing is very difficult and can be a noisy process, and there is no guarantee that a paper will published, regardless of how deserving it may be. But if you can, I believe publishing well during graduate school can be a fantastic way to help boost your chances on the job market and to start developing some of the skills that will help you become successful once you have a position (this is true even if you are not able to publish but have gone through the process).
The most important pieces of advice I can give you are that 1) you should think about what kind of economist you would like to be and where you would like to end up; and 2) you should talk to people: your advisor and committee members, other faculty members, and those who have worked at the types of departments/organizations that you might like to end up at. Both of these will help you find advice more specific to your circumstances, help determine which journals and departments might be a good fit, and better navigate the publication process in general.
References
Aboozar Hadavand, Daniel S Hamermesh, and Wesley W Wilson. Publishing economics: How slow? why slow? is slow productive? fixing slow? Journal of Economic Literature, Forthcoming.
Brooke Helppie McFall, Marta Murray-Close, Robert J Willis, and Uniko Chen. Is it all worth it? The experiences of new PhDs on the job market, 2007–10. The Journal of Economic Education, 46(1):83–104, 2015.
David McKenzie. The state of development journals 2020: Quality, acceptance rates, review times, and multiple rounds of revisions. Development Impact Blog, 2020.
Steve Pischke. How to get started on research in economics? 2019. https://econ.lse.ac.uk/staff/spischke/phds/How to start.pdf