‘Tis the season for economics job hunters. The annual ASSA meetings kick off tomorrow, brining together, for a few days, what is probably the largest collection of economists in the world (scary, I know!). The meeting also marks the start of the job market for academic economists. For a variety reasons, agricultural economics departments have increasingly moved hiring to coordinate with the ASSA meetings, and agricultural economics departments appear to be more apt these days to hire new faculty from general economics programs.
There is ample advice for prospective job market candidates online (this paper by John Cawley is among the best), and I won’t attempt to add to it here. Rather, the purpose of this post is to provide a bit of perspective for job market candidates from traditional economics departments who may be considering jobs in agricultural economics.
There are two main factors that create different incentives for faculty in agricultural economics departments compared to faculty (often just down the hall) in general economics programs.
The first is funding. The existence of separate agricultural economics departments stems from federal and state monies specifically allocated for agricultural research and education. Unlike general economics departments, where revenues to the department primarily flow from general university revenues, agricultural economics departments have federal dollars for research (these are often referred to as “Hatch” or “experiment station” funds”) and extension or outreach activities (these are often referred to as “Smith-Lever” or “extension service” funds), which are then matched with funds from the state government where the university resides. This is what people are referring to when they talk about “Land Grant” universities – the dedicated, funded, missions not just for teaching, but for applied research and outreach and extension.
The second differentiating factor is the promotion process. Typically, faculty seeking tenure and promotion in an agricultural economics department must ultimately be evaluated by a committee made up of faculty and administrators in a college of agriculture or natural resources. This can be contrasted with assistant professors in general economics programs who go on to be evaluated by other faculty in colleges of business or colleges of arts and science. This distinction implies that faculty in agricultural economics departments, when going up for promotion, are more likely to be evaluated by “bench” scientists running labs.
These two combined factors go on to create different outcomes and incentives for faculty in agricultural economics departments than in general economics departments. Here are a few that come to mind:
In general, faculty in agricultural economics departments teach less than in general economics department. The reason is straightforward: agricultural economics faculty are literally paid to spend their time doing other things (research or outreach).
The expectations to bring in grants is higher in agricultural economics departments than in general economics departments. This differential incentive stems from the aforementioned evaluation by “bench” scientists at the college level but also from greater availability of funding for agricultural research, the differential incentives to focus on applied problems, and the closer connection to companies, farm groups, and NGOs in the agricultural sector that fund research.
In the “quality”-quantity tradeoff, agricultural economists will normally face greater incentives to generate “quantity” than will a faculty member in a general economics department. The reasons are multi-faceted including the need to show productivity and returns on grant dollars, the greater interest from immediate stakeholders (think farmers, policy makers, agribusinesses) in applied research results, and the evaluation by “bench” scientists who tend to have many more publications. By the way, this incentive shows up in salary differentials (see this paper by Gibson and Burton-McKenzie showing salaries in agricultural economics departments are positively related to the quantity of journal articles, but numbers of papers (after adjusting for “quality”) have no independent effect in general economics departments; see also my co-authored paper with Tia and Mike Hilmer comparing salary structures between econ and ag econ programs).
In the previous bullet “quality” is in scare quotes because in general economics programs “quality” often means only one thing: publication in one of the so-called top five journals. I won’t get into the tyranny of the top five, except to say that quality has a broader definition in many agricultural economics departments. Part of the reason is that an agricultural economist often has a broader audience for their work, including non-economists, policy makers, farmers, agribusinesses, etc. Sometimes this results in greater impact. For example, general interest science journals, and interdisciplinary science journals, often have much higher impact factors than do the “top five” economics journals, and this is considered differently in agricultural economics departments that, on the margin, are more focused on applied results with real-world impact (at least in our narrower domain).
In agricultural economists, it is relatively more common to have journal articles with many co-authors, and to include graduate students in publications, than is the case in among general economists. Again, this partially stems from the closer connection to “bench” scientists, who include everyone in the lab who worked on the project on the publication. Another incentive at play is that agricultural economists are more likely to work on multidisciplinary problems with ecologists, animal scientists, agronomists, etc. who bring different expertise to problems, resulting in papers with more co-authors.
In agricultural economics departments, there is often greater incentive to focus on more local issues relevant to the region and state where the university resides. Federal monies must be matched with state dollars, and the political support for providing the state dollars indirectly relates to the willingness of faculty to work on issues deemed relevant to local stakeholders.
The extension mission in agricultural economics departments can often be among the most mystifying difference to students coming out of general economics departments, which typically have no such explicit mission. One way to think about it is that faculty with extension appointments have class as well, it’s just that their students are farmers, local government officials, agribusiness managers, etc. and agricultural economists reach these “students” in non-traditional ways by going out to their meetings or writing newsletters or doing podcasts or media interviews. Another potential way to think about extension or outreach work is the model of economist as consultant, where the goal isn’t to publish an academic paper, but to take the academic knowledge and convert it into decision aids, tools, white papers, etc. that improve managerial and policy decision making.
I hope these few thoughts help add some clarity for folks from general economics programs who may be considering employment in an agricultural economic department. Agricultural economics departments are a great place to work, where there are tangible rewards to working on real-world issues affecting a sector of our economy that touches every living person through our dinner plates. Good luck with the job hunt!