'Cluster Hiring' Reshapes Economics Department

Duke's Department of Economics has revived its ranks with a hiring coup that administrators see as a model for boosting other departments.

The economics department hired nine new professors and researchers this year. No department at Duke has hired so many regular rank professors -- seven -- in a single year in at least a decade.

The nine hires come in addition to seven others who have joined the department over the last four years. Most of the new professors are near the beginning of their careers and publish regularly in top economics journals. Many came from universities with economics departments ranked higher than Duke's, and passed up offers from others. (Duke was 22nd in the latest National Research Council rankings, in 1995.)

The New Nine

Nine new professors and researchers joined the economics department this year.

Atila Abdulkadiroglu joins the department as an associate professor, arriving from Columbia University. He studies how public schools with school choice systems can use game theory to improve the matching between schools and students.

Patrick Bayer is an associate professor in the department after leaving Yale University. He uses economics tools to study social interactions, especially in neighborhoods and schools.

Gale Boyd comes to the department from Argonne National Laboratories and is now a research scholar and director of the Triangle Census Research Data Center, which gives researchers access to detailed census data.

Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde left the University of Pennsylvania to become an associate professor at Duke. He studies econometrics, the mathematics of applied economics, and recently shared with Rubio-Ramirez the prize for the best paper published in the Journal of Applied Econometrics over a two-year period.

Kevin Hoover comes from University of California, Davis to join the Duke faculty as a professor of economics and philosophy. His research is on the history of economic thought.

Shakeeb Khan, an associate professor in the department, was previously at the University of Rochester. He studies the statistics used in economics.

Bahar Leventoglu joins Duke as an assistant professor of political science and economics; she left SUNY-Stony Brook. She uses game theory to study diplomacy around war.

Jing Li came from the University of Pennsylvania to be an assistant professor in the department. She uses game theory to model people's social preferences.

Juan Rubio-Ramirez was at the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank before joining the department as an associate professor. He studies econometrics, the mathematics of applied economics.

A major piece in the strategy to attract the new crop of scholars was "cluster hiring" -- recruiting groups of researchers who share an approach to an academic discipline and have existing relationships.

"When you go to different places and have different offers, you can also see the set of other people they're interested in," said Professor Patrick Bayer, who left Yale to join the department this year. "The set of people Duke has hired in the last few years -- even people they've made offers to who didn't come -- speaks a lot to the type of department we're trying to create here."

Professor Shakeeb Khan said his decision to leave a tenured position at the University of Rochester to come to Duke this year was not based on "the food or the weather; it's just the research environment." Mentioning fellow economist Han Hong, who came to Duke from Princeton three years ago, Khan said, "He's actually the main reason I came -- it was to talk to Han."

Professor Lutz Weinke, a monetary economist, also cited the chance to work with colleagues at Duke as a reason he joined the department last year. "There are two world experts in my field [at Duke], namely Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé and Martin Uribe," he said. Uribe and Schmitt-Grohé both came to Duke three years ago from, respectively, the University of Pennsylvania and Rutgers.

Having assisted in the department's recruiting, Provost Peter Lange said, "A lot of the techniques that we've used in economics are built into the Faculty Enhancement Initiative in the new strategic plan, and we're going to use them in a number of other departments across the university."

The rise of caliber and quantity of Duke economics professors was the result of a plan by administrators and the department that dates back at least six years to a departmental review commissioned by Lange, who had recently become provost.

"It was clear economics was an extremely important core discipline in the social sciences," Lange said. "It has a very strong paradigm and so a lot of the other social sciences draw on that core either in a way of organizing some of their work or as the paradigm against which they work."

Economics also has the potential to contribute to research in fields beyond the social sciences, such as business and public policy, Lange said.

"Furthermore, we had a great deal of undergraduate enrollment in that major," he said.

Despite economics' important role at the university, Lange said the review found "the department was understaffed given both the size of the major and our comparative look at other economics departments around the country and the size it had been historically."

Working with Lange, the department implemented reforms to improve undergraduate instruction, such as by creating regular "professor of the practice" positions and launching the EcoTeach center.

In March 2002, Professor Thomas Nechyba was offered the chairmanship of the department. Only 33 years old at the time, Nechyba was serving as the department's director of undergraduate studies and was not ready to immediately assume more administrative responsibility. However, he agreed to spend the next year developing a strategy for transforming a department whose members included several nearing retirement. In July 2003, Nechyba accepted the position, having conceived a plan to recruit early-career faculty accustomed to working across economics subdisciplines.

Raking in Recruits

Economics department chair Thomas Nechyba learned the following lessons for recruiting faculty over the course of a four-year hiring spree.

Have an intellectual vision for the department. Nechyba saw the future of his field moving toward research that cuts across traditional economics subdisciplines, so he sought out scholars already using that approach. "Yes, we recruited someone in [a subdiscipline like] public economics," he says. "But this recruit is viewing the people we have in labor economics, industrial organization, in applied econometrics – he's using all of those people as part of his community, and so that creates a much stronger attraction for someone like him."

Hire clusters of candidates who share that intellectual vision. "We do try to make hires that have intellectual synergies, so sometimes we hire intellectual couples," Nechyba says. "[Patrick] Bayer and [Christopher] Timmins are an intellectual couple; they write together. [Jesus] Fernandez-Villaverde and [Juan] Rubio-Ramirez are an intellectual couple." Nechyba adds, "When the clusters themselves are part of a bigger intellectual plan, you soon find new clusters emerging as some who did not previously work together start collaborating when they get here."

Get support from the university administration. "Academic economics markets are very competitive and you have to be able to move very, very quickly," Nechyba says. "And so [administrators] devolved to the department a level of discretion that I think we needed in order to be able to do something like we did last year."

The Triangle is a good place to raise a family -- use that as a selling point for young faculty. "Recruiting real-world couples helps in the process given that this is an area with a lot of people who are at a stage in their lives where they have young kids and are looking to settle in a place," Nechyba says.

Make sure the position is a match for the whole person. "It's like Don Quixote chasing the windmills trying to convince somebody whose heart is absolutely in New York City that Durham is just as good," Nechyba says. "If you know something about a person from early on, that helps you from chasing windmills."

Look beyond a candidate's CV to evaluate the caliber of his/her work and likely alignment with the department's intellectual vision. "A typical top-five department might simply look at a CV and say, ‘Gee, it's not very long yet,'" Nechyba says. "We look at what's underneath a CV, and we read those papers -- we read both what's published and what's not published."

If you've done your homework on candidates, you can be aggressive with tenure offers. "When we move a year ahead [of the normal time for tenure promotion], people might look at the CV and say, ‘Boy that's a gutsy move, I hope it works out,'" Nechyba says. "But in the end I think it's not nearly as gutsy as it seems to everybody else."

"We were going to have the opportunity to hire the equivalent of a new department within a relatively compressed period," Nechyba said. "It's very rare in a department's history that there's a chance for the department to reinvent itself.

"If it was just a matter of moving bodies around the profession, it wouldn't have been very exciting," he said. "But we had an intellectual vision of getting people to come here who otherwise would have never worked together, and who could combine their skills here in a way that creates much more than they individually could have. That's what is exciting."

Added Lange, "Tom became chair, and Tom brought forward a proposal for an aggressive program to finally allow us to make a breakthrough."

Based on recommendations from previous departmental reviews, the proposal aimed to dramatically increase the number of economics faculty in just four years. The idea was to hire enough junior and tenured faculty so that as older members of the department retired, the total number of faculty in the department would rise from 25 to above 40 before leveling out in the mid-30s -- all while building a reputation for top-notch, intellectually broad scholarship.

Nechyba scored an early victory, bringing on three tenured professors his first year as chair. But in the next two years, with some "near misses," he landed only two tenured faculty. On top of that, two professors left the department, leaving a net gain of three -- six positions short of the nine new tenure positions called for in the original proposal.

"I was so focused on finishing the four years correctly, the way we had anticipated, because it was so important for our faculty to say, 'Well, gee, we said we were going to do it and we did it,'" Nechyba said.

Susan Roth, now vice provost for interdisciplinary studies, was the dean of social sciences during the crucial recruitment years of 2004 through 2006. She said the administration was committed to supporting Nechyba's efforts by providing timely offers and counter-offers to potential hires.

"When a chair and a department go after that many people at once, it's incredibly stressful, and a great deal of support from the administration is required," she said.

"Economists' cherished notion of supply and demand applies in the market for economics faculty," added George McLendon, who became dean of the faculty of Arts and Sciences in 2004. "The supply of economists is not commensurate with the demand for them."

Going into the final year of the four-year plan, Nechyba worked with Roth, McLendon and Lange on an extra selling point for potential recruits: a commitment from the university to set aside enough money over the ensuing five years to sustain the department's hiring goals.

"Look, every dean, every place they go to, every place they get recruited at, is telling them, ‘Oh we're going to invest in economics, we're going to do all these things,'" Nechyba said. "Well, here, there is an account with a dollar figure in it that's extremely impressive, and that dollar figure has been put there by the deans, by the provost, by the university as a signal that this is for real." With the additional backing and some lessons learned (see sidebar), Nechyba and his colleagues accelerated the process. Six candidates accepted tenured positions this year, two joined as assistant professors and one was hired as a researcher. (One professor received a joint appointment in philosophy.)

"I was one of the early recruits, so when I was hired most of these people were not here," said Uribe, the monetary economist who joined the department in 2003. "But Tom talked about the plan he had for the evolution of the department for the next few years and I thought it was a great plan, so I was very excited to join."

The plan is not entirely implemented; the department is slated to make another three hires this year.

McLendon points out another piece of unfinished business. "Tom would like, and we would like to see, more diversity in the hires," he said.

Lange said the experience to date will inform faculty hiring elsewhere at Duke. "It's a structure of a plan we'll probably be using with some other departments, although probably not at this scale."

Roth said she wants to see other departments follow economics' example of "making Duke not only distinguished but distinctive."

Nechyba said the plan's legacy is yet to be determined.

"There are some examples in the profession of departments that over the period of a decade or a decade and a half came from roughly where we started and ended up as being recognized as a top department," he said. "I think a classic example is Northwestern, which did this back in the '70s.

"Departments like that go through a period where there's a clear upward trajectory -- everybody knows it and everybody is uncertain about whether it is going to sustain," he said. "We're sort of on that path and there's a question of are we going to sustain it?"