If I Master Econometrics, What Jobs Can I Get?

The job market for people with skills in econometrics is exploding. In this video, MIT professor Josh Angrist describes the opportunities awaiting empirically-minded economics majors, including new careers in high tech firms such as Amazon and Uber.

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If I master econometrics, what jobs can I get?

Our students, both undergraduate, master's, and Ph.D. students, have a very robust job market. The traditional non-academic job market for an economics major with quantitative skills is kind of consulting, also finance. 

What's happened in the last 10 or 15 years is this new sector has opened up. Some people call it the Silicon Valley sector. Google, Facebook, Uber, Netflix, Amazon -- they're hiring economists with, again, quantitative skills, for the most part, not necessarily card-carrying econometricians, but people who are good with data and trained with data. 

What's new about, say, Amazon, as opposed to some of these other employers that have been around for a long time, is Amazon is asking fairly narrow but very clearly causal questions about their own world. They have the data to answer them, and they're prepared to run experiments. 

I now have three Ph.D. students working at Amazon. It's apparently not okay for them to talk in any detail about what they do there. So when I asked them, "What are you up to?" they say, "We're running experiments.

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