People outside of academia may notice that professors move from one school to another from time to time, but what they probably don't realize is how competitive (and organized) the academic job market is. This article does a pretty good job of shining some light on how schools compete with each other for both new and established professors in the economics world. The best part of the article is probably the last paragraph:

"I tell our PhD students, you're fortunate to have chosen economics instead of philosophy or English," says John Cawley, professor of economics at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. "Because the reality is, everyone gets a job."

I think that is the first time I've heard someone say that it's good to be an economist, but the numbers do in fact back up Professor Cawley's statement. This article (if you scroll to the bottom) shows professor salaries in different fields as compared to the salary of an English professor. Economics professors do pretty well on this scale, not only beating the benchmark salary consistently but also increasing their lead over time, resulting in a 41.2% pay premium for the 2009-2010 academic year. Only business and law professors do better, which is particularly interesting since a pretty significant number of those are technically economists as well.

The John Bates Clark Medal, awarded each year by the American Economic Association to the most promising economist under the age of forty, is sometimes referred to as the "Baby Nobel," since 12 out of 34 previous winners have gone on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. (In addition, it's worth keeping in mind that the John Bates Clark Medal has been around since 1947 but the first Nobel Prize in Economics wasn't awarded until 1969. That said, the John Bates Clark Medal was only awarded every other year before 2009.)

This year's winner of the John Bates Clark Medal is MIT's Amy Finkelstein, who specializes in the economics of health care. From the AEA:

Amy's research is focused on health insurance markets. Within this area, she has had three main interrelated lines of research: (a) Tests on the presence of asymmetric information in insurance markets; (b) Structural estimation and analysis of welfare implications of models with asymmetric information; (c) Effects of public intervention in health and long-­‐term care insurance markets.

In other words, Professor Finkelstein looks at the ramifications of the fact that individuals know more about their own health than insurers do when people choose whether or not to sign up for health insurance. she also investigates whether improving access to health care makes individuals healthier and happier. Can't really argue with the importance of that.

Most people who have studied economics know that the Prisoners' Dilemma is one of the classic problems in game theory. But what happens when the theory is put to the test?

Economists have found an unexpected lesson via a British game show that essentially replicates the Prisoners' Dilemma game in front of a viewing audience, with one minor difference- if one player chooses to defect, the other player doesn't get any money regardless of what he chooses to do. This detail has interesting implications, as you can see here.

What would you have done in this situation? Why did this strategy work? You can see a discussion of the outcome here.

There are a lot of economists out there in the Twitterverse, but it can sometimes be difficult to find and follow them in an organized way. Luckily, onlinecollege.org has put together a list of what they consider 50 Useful Twitter Feeds for Econ Students. The tweeters are organized into categories such as "Economists," "Entrepreneurship," and "Personal Finance," and they include accounts such as Freakonomics, The World Economic Forum, and The Economist.

Alternatively, you could just follow me, or, better yet, check out my check out my economics Twitter list.