Career Advice from a great Aussie Economist

From a profile of Justin Wolfers, now guest blogging at MR;

Wolfers earned his bachelor’s in economics at the University of Sydney with first-class honors in 1994, then went to work at the Reserve Bank of Australia, the country’s central bank. In 1997, he arrived at Harvard for Ph.D. work, planning to return home with his sights on becoming Secretary to the Treasury some day. Unlike his father, a political science professor, he preferred public policy to academe.

But after just a few months at Harvard, one of his advisers invited Wolfers to a meeting of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the prestigious orga¬nization headed by Martin Feldstein, who chaired President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. The room was filled with some of the best economists in the world, conducting exciting, original research. Wolfers decided then on the aca¬demic life in the United States. He would not be returning to Australia.

“I realized that what was happening in that room—50 central banks from around the world were more or less going to take those ideas and implement them. I thought, wow! This is a lot more exciting than being the guy back home who replicates their research,” Wolfers said...

“He’s very creative, in terms of asking inter¬esting research questions,” says Eric Zitzewitz, a highly regarded assistant professor of econom¬ics at Stanford’s business school who has known Wolfers for years and collaborated with him on such projects as a chapter on prediction markets in the book, Information Markets: A New Way of Making Decisions, published by AEI-Brookings Press...

While Wolfers’s study was inconclusive, Zitzewitz said that “it was a really creative way of approach¬ing the policy-relevant question, ‘Should we go to war?’ Justin is technically competent, and he’s well trained, but he’s not super-mathematical. He doesn’t delve into new econometric techniques. He simply takes existing techniques and applies them to really interesting questions.”...

He likes the life he’s chosen. “I could do the same work I’m doing now for an Australian institution, and the truth is, no one would listen,” he says. But from his perch at Wharton, his work finds its way to financiers, business leaders, and policymakers all over the world.

Related;
Justin Wolfers’s Solution for Gambling Scandals: More Gambling