Gabriele Gratton

MARKET POWER IS POWER New working paper with @bartonelee2 Thread below! 1/5 gratton.org/papers/MarketP…

An Econ PhD student at the 20th ranked program who is working on stuff they are passionate about will have a better job market than one at MIT who's been doing nothing but phd-app-maxxing since undergrad. People get confused by this because they don't observe *how* successful people came about their insane knowledge bases. It wasn't by relentlessly grinding away at stuff because they had to. They look at Scott Kominers and say "if i grind and learn as much math as he did, i will be successful." You can't! *You* can't learn as much math as Kominers because he gets energized by configuration results for type ii lattices. You will burn out if you try to do it this way. You cannot, through grind alone, learn more about the economics of cities than Glaeser, or about how to maximize a value function than Acemoglu. Research careers are long. Most people give up and stop working on research (graph is share of elite PhD graduates with at least one publication in year X after graduation). If you're starting a PhD, you're presumably doing it to have a successful 40-year research career. The number one factor in whether that happens is not which program you get into, it's whether you find a research angle that energizes you enough to push through the endless barriers an academic career throws in your path. This is why a lot of the received wisdom around PhD applications is wrong. If you're 100% consumed by the predoc rat race already, it's going to be a long, hard road ahead. Obv you still have to do admissions, you should study a lot for the GRE, sigh it seems like taking real analysis is probably worth it. But spending time on the things that energize you about economics is a no-brainer, whether it's policy, or blogging, or whatever, you gotta do the things that light your fire and make you want to be on this road.

@DavidUbilava Yes. I think this is a case of two excellent groups of researchers (that I trust a lot) who worked on the same brilliant idea. But the institutions failed us! You would have worked differently after Nov 25 if you know of their paper and that is the (efficient) norm in our field.

@grattonecon Oh, okay, thanks for this -- this clearly changes the story, and I am glad its how it went down -- otherwise I was losing faith in the discipline.

I have heard of stories of being scooped (even if unintentionally). First one for me, and this stings. Here is our working paper, which we posted on ssrn back in January: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… And today I saw a Science article (link in the comment) that is basically it.

@DavidUbilava What I think could be useful to think of is the opportunity of this dual system in our field: WP and long-waits for pubs with public discussion for Econ journals & secret scoop with no public discussion for Nature/Science etc. It's definitely not optimal.

@DavidUbilava I am sorry this happened. You had a really nice paper and a cool idea. In defence of Dominic and co they submitted in Nov 2025 and Science would not publish if there is a circulating WP (and embargo till publication, hence all the NYT etc articles today).

@ZacGross @J_Meanwell They also track me. It’s the mics sometimes don’t work well.

@J_Meanwell @grattonecon Monash has cameras which automatically track you as you absent mindedly walk across lecture theatre - no respite! (Unless you switch it off).

2/ How about attending lectures? Asking questions? Intellectual curiosity? Learning? Without focusing on these aspects, there is no real university education—only university degrees. A few thoughts:

@J_Meanwell @ZacGross Yeah built in but can also be muted. but as soon as my voice is jot recorded perfectly students complain.

@ZacGross @grattonecon Unfortunately, our recording tech is built into the room. But there’s lots you can do on the margin: speak before the recording starts; walk away from the lectern microphone; write on the white board instead of on-computer slides; unrecorded interactions with in-class students.

@ZacGross Conditional on enrolment or unconditional? Anyway, i can try next year and see if they let me.

@grattonecon I was told the same thing when I started at Monash. But student opposition was basically non-existent.

@ZacGross To be precise, I belive I in principle could do it, but all the incentives and structures are against it. In line with my points above, these should not be choices in the hands of lecturers, and individual lecturers should nto choose to provide only one type of education.

@ZacGross I cannot. Turns out YOU can do things (not me 😂).

9/ Genuinely caring about uni education means providing opportunities for both, not a mish-mash of everything fitting nobody's needs. We need less "compliance" and rules and better and creative thinking about our core mission: greater knowledge for more people.

8/ The latter group is just frustrated by institutions built around an old idea of university as an elite education for the very few privileged and some lucky super-talented ones. They want flexible schedules and deadlines and courses designed to learn job-ready skills.

Many complain about the state of Australian university education. Yet almost all the pressure is on assessments, adjustments, rules, compliance, overseas enrolments, AI cheating, and administration. Very little discussion is actually about learning. 1/.🧵

Lots of wisdom on the good, the bad and the ugly of our profession 👇

Check out our paper