A number of trade economists are worried that PhD students have been losing interest in international trade. One way to measure interest in the field is to tally job-market papers, which I’ve been doing since 2010. The number of JMPs in international trade listed on my blog has grown over time, but the set of schools I cover has been expanding. When looking at the number of trade candidates produced by a fixed set of schools, I expected to find a substantial decline.
I tallied the number of candidates produced by two groups of schools: the schools who had candidates in the first two years of the list (2010-2011) and the top 11 economics departments (US News’ top 10 departments plus LSE). The results surprised me.
The number of trade JMPs produced by the “original” cohort of schools grew steadily from 2012 through 2019. Only after the onset of the pandemic did the number of trade JMPs decline, and the nadir seen in 2022 was similar to the count of candidates in 2012 and 2015. A very small decline, if any.
The top 11 departments have typically produced about 11 trade JMPs each year over the last 14 years. The average is a little lower after 2017 than before.
I have sometimes included a JMP on both the trade and spatial lists. For example, about one JMP per year from the top-11 schools is cross-listed. If forced to dichotomize, I would have classified some of those JMPs as more spatial than trade. Rather than make such judgments now, the dashed lines present the most conservative approach, which excludes all cross-listed JMPs from the trade tally.
While the number of trade candidates has declined since 2019, this does not necessarily imply a declining market share for international trade. As described in a recent Report of the AEA Committee on the Job Market, the supply of new PhD economists appears to have declined. Both the number of students who applied to at least one job through the JOE and the number who sent a job market signal are down about 10% since 2017. In light of this, the decrease in trade candidates produced by the top 11 departments seems modest.
What to make of the surprisingly small decline in trade JMPs? When people complain about the decline of international trade among job-market candidates, do they say “the number of candidates has declined to 2012 levels”? Or are they reflecting on something other than the the raw count of trade JMPs, like placement outcomes or particular styles of research? A counterfactual scenario in which the number of trade JMPs would have been growing if spatial candidates had studied international trade instead?