Doing an economics PhD can be full of challenges and difficulties. Here we look at some of the personal qualities that will help you continue making progress when you encounter a problem.

Our favorite caricature of a post-doctoral researcher: a frail man (or woman) with unkempt hair, hunched in front of a computer screen, with a half-filled cup of coffee by his side. As the coffee gets colder and time flies by, he appears oblivious to his surroundings. He is happy spending long hours at his desk conceptualizing arcane theory on obscure topics the real world does not care about. He is in a state of eternal "tapasya" – meditating on his eternal love-affair with knowledge…because life is an eternal quest for knowledge! Or, so the world believes. Once the PhD has been completed, and freshly-minted researchers decide that research is what they would like to do for the rest of their lives, their friends and family might start assuming that a Doctor of Philosophy is just another armchair intellectual.

A PhD is a life choice. One of the crucial factors that a potential graduate student should account for is that doing a PhD in the US can be a completely different experience from doing a PhD in Italy, Germany, or elsewhere in Europe.

Doing an economics PhD will make you an expert in your research topic, but, beyond that, it will also teach you a number of valuable lessons which are applicable to other jobs and your personal life. Here are some of the most useful lessons that you'll learn from undertaking your own independent research project. If you plan to start your PhD application this autumn, download our free guide "How to successfully apply to a PhD in Economics".

Doing an economics PhD can feel like an all-encompassing task, but it's important for your well-being that you have a social life during this time as well. It can be hard to balance the two, but if you don't, you may find yourself overwhelmed and not able to enjoy your time researching and writing as much. Here are tips on balancing your PhD with your social life.

Due to COVID-19, PhD applicants over the past two years have had quite difficult application periods. It seems common now for students to apply to a range of universities and not be accepted to any of them. In fact, even without this exogenous pandemic factor, admission to economics PhD programs has been becoming increasingly difficult as a result of the excess supply of PhD applicants.

The following article first appeared in the INOMICS Handbook 2022. Download the INOMICS Handbook Professor Marcel Fratzscher, esteemed macroeconomist and president of the DIW Berlin, once again asks questions about economics and life in general to a peer in the 2022 edition of the INOMICS Handbook Questionnaire. This time, he has the pleasure of being joined by renowned economic historian Adam Tooze, who generously agreed to take the hot seat in this exchange. Thus, the back-and-forth has been dubbed Fratzscher vs. Tooze, as is tradition. What follows is a dive into the beauty of wild places, the gender bias still present in economics, the link between policy makers and central banks, the limits of the search for perfect causality in the social sciences, and even more. Tooze’s perspective is unique and fresh, and is sure to be an interesting read you won’t want to miss.

Klaus Teuber’s Settlers of Catan is a popular board game that has become a mainstay of friendly gatherings across the globe. For the uninitiated, in Catan up to 4 players compete to be the first one with 10 victory points. Points are gained by building houses (“settlements”), cities, and roads on a heretofore unsettled island rife with natural resources. Catan has nearly limitless replay value - with 3,695,814,682,560,000 (over 3 quadrillion!) different unique board layouts using just the base rules. Chances are, you’ve heard of Catan even if you don’t particularly love board games.