| January 3-4, 2024 | PREP FOR AEA MEETINGS – Held in San Francisco, CA on January 3-5, 2025. |
| January 2 | DAY BEFORE OFFICIAL START OF MEETINGS: Some interviews will be scheduled on this day. |
| January 3-5 | AEA MEETINGS: January 4 and 5 are the main days for the meetings, and for interviews. The official meetings end around noon on the 5th, but interviews may continue until mid-afternoon. |
| January | BE AT YOUR HOME BASE: Usually, this will be Berkeley. Don't take time off for a vacation, as fly-backs can begin immediately. Above all, make sure you can monitor your e-mail and answering machine twice a day, and respond immediately when someone contacts you; if you delay in getting back to an institution, they will think you are not interested. |
| January-May | FLY-BACKS: Your first task will be biting your nails until the first fly-back invitation arrives. This is a horrible time, so try to resist the temptation to go crazy. Many students wait for weeks with no action, then suddenly get a half-dozen fly-backs scheduled in the course of a few days. Try to get work done on your dissertation while you are waiting. Once the first invitation comes in, contact the Placement Officer immediately; the two of you will work out a strategy for using this initial invitation to generate additional fly-backs. Do not schedule fly-backs too closely. It is impossible to do fly-backs in different cities on successive days. Even if two institutions are in the same city, it is much better to have a day off in between if at all possible. OFFERS: As soon as you get your first offer, contact the Placement Officer immediately to work out a strategy for negotiating over terms, dealing with deadlines, and using the offer(s) you have to generate other offers. |
| Early March | AEA JOB SCRAMBLE: Occasionally prospective employers of new Ph.D. economists exhaust their candidates before hiring someone during the winter/spring "job market" period. Similarly, new economics Ph.D.s seeking a job sometimes find that all of the prospective employers with whom they have interviewed have hired someone else before they have secured an appointment. To address these problems, the AEA has established a "Job Market Scramble" web site to facilitate communication between employers and job seekers. In early March employers that continue to have an available position advertised in Job Openings for Economists (JOE) prior to February 15 may post a short notice of its availability (with a link to the JOE listing). Similarly, new or recent economics Ph.D. job seekers still looking for a position may post a short announcement of their continued availability, with a link to their application materials (C.V., papers, and references). The web site will open for viewing only to those who have registered for this service. |