Economics Is Really Hard, Even for Harvard Ph.D.s

Economics ain’t easy. A new study finds that’s true even for people with doctorates from such top schools as Harvard and MIT. In the first six years after getting their Ph.D.s, the vast majority of them don’t manage to do any economic research that’s good enough to be published in the top journals.

The title of the study, which appeared in the summer issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, is “The Research Productivity of New PhDs in Economics: The Surprisingly High Non-Success of the Successful.” Its authors are John P. Conley, a professor at Vanderbilt University, and Ali Sina Öder, a lecturer at the University of Bayreuth in Germany.