Discover 391 opportunities in economics

Halloween is a highly commercialized holiday in the US, with people of all ages celebrating and spending. Expected Halloween spending of US consumers in 2012 almost equals government expenditures of Kenya. According to surveys conducted annually by the National Retail Federation, in last five years total spending on Halloween in the US grew from $4.96 billion in 2006 to an expected $8 billion in 2012. After a significant drop in spending in 2009, consumers managed to bring it back up to the level of a previous year in 2010.

Google’s California headquarters is one of the more unusual places where you might find economists hard at work. While economists did not have a place at Google when it launched in 1998, by 2002 Google had begun to hire economists in advisory roles as the demand for Google’s ad space grew in size and complexity.

“You can’t be an economist without noticing all the interesting things about how the economy works, it is natural to be interested in it and I have had the privilege to be able to study it” said Alvin A. Roth answering questions during the unexpected 4am call from Sweden. Together with Lloyd S. Shapley, Roth was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel – more commonly known as the Nobel Prize in Economics – “for the theory of stable allocations and practice of market design”. During the award speech the field was described as being  “…about economic engineering, [and] how to design certain markets where the traditional market mechanism is expected to not work well.”

Data published on OECD.Stats Extracts gives an overview of the absolute numbers of graduates from tertiary type-A and advanced research programs for all standard fields of education.  According to the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED), economics and economic history fall under the category of Social and Behavioral Science (business and related disciplines are not included). The graph presented above includes aggregated data for countries with the largest number of graduates in social and behavioral science* for the year 2010. The number of graduates from the US significantly out numbers graduates from other OECD countries, leading in every other discipline as well. Unfortunately, there is no information available on the exact percentage of economists among the graduates.

On November 16, 2006 the world lost one of the most influential economists of the twentieth century. Today, July 31, 2012, Milton Friedman would have celebrated his 100th birthday, which makes it perhaps a fitting time to stop for a moment and recall some of his contributions to the field.

With English being considered the “must-have language”, is there a need for economists to learn a foreign language, or does it concern only those who work or want to work in the business field in a non-English speaking country?

Three Economists go out hunting

In between the common subdisciplines of economics like international or financial economics, lie many much smaller specializations, for example the economics of language. The term “economics of language“ is defined by François Grin, to be “the paradigm of mainstream theoretical economics and uses the concepts and tools of economics in the study of relationships featuring linguistic variables, it focuses principally, but non exclusively, on those relationships in which economic variables also play a part”.

The Tilburg University Economics Ranking Sandbox For anyone that doesn’t know it, the Tilburg University Economics Ranking, which ranks economics departments based on contributions to articles published in any one of 62 (mostly English-language) economics-related journals, is well worth a look.

The move from high school to university or college can be a daunting one, often made more difficult by the question ‘what am I going to study.’ This is naturally influenced by personal interests, past experiences, parents, friends, and teachers, but when it comes down to it, it is the student that has to decide what is interesting for them. I have taken a troll around the Internet to see what people have to say in favour of studying economics and come up with some interesting answer.