Friday, October 16, 2009

Looking for Academic Economics Jobs in Australia

In the past not many foreign institutions advertised on the American Economic Association's jobs website JOE. But this seems to have changed and now most leading Australian universities are advertising there. Not all these positions appear to be advertised on UniJobs, which I think is the leading Australian academic job site.

I've had a couple of recent discussions with people looking to do PhDs from around the world recently. I tried to convince them that if they want to work in Australia they need to either do a PhD in Australia (at a Go8 university) or do a PhD in the US. These are the two markets Australian universities are recruiting in. Not Britain or Sweden or anywhere else in Europe...

4 comments:

  1. I interviewed at AEAs with an Aussie school, and my clear point of failure was when they asked why I wanted to go to Australia - I said I'd been there, it seemed like a nice enough place, and they had a good job in my field, which all seemed fine to me. I think they suspect the Americans (or many of us, anyhow) of trying to scam a discount vacation off of them - if I'd said 'madly in love with my Australian Fiancee' would I have had a better chance?

    ReplyDelete
  2. I don't know... they are going to the US to recruit because they it's the biggest market and they think US PhDs are best (Graduates of other Australian universities apart from ANU seem to have zero chance of getting a job at ANU...) Of course, 2/3 of US PhDs in economics are going to non-US citizens and that is mainly the market they are looking to capture but there are also plenty of US born people working here at ANU. Maybe it depends on the university that's doing the recruiting. Only one time have I come across a university blatantly say that they suspect people of scamming them. The invitation said that if you were made an offer and rejected it your expenses would not be refunded! This was the University of York in the UK - where I had actually worked previously..

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hah, I had some odd interactions with York at one point too (I was very willing to skip the country, though I'm quite happy where I ended up). Haven't dealt with enough other UK schools to know if it's standard there, but it wouldn't surprise me, really - the government there seems to view the whole educational enterprise with quite a bit of institutional skepticism.

    ReplyDelete
  4. As it turns out I also had an interview with Cambridge - they brought six candidates in including at least one from the US and then hired the most junior internal candidate. So I got them to pay for the flight from Australia and all York had to pay for was the rail ticket from Cambridge :)

    ReplyDelete