Tech titans compete with universities

Wooing this year’s best graduate students in economics are familiar faces from Princeton, Harvard and other American universities seeking assistant professors – and eBay’s not yet three-year-old economic research team, reports Bloomberg.

The American Economic Association’s annual meeting kicked off last Friday and eBay is not the only technology company aiming to tap more brainpower at what doubles as the discipline’s premier job fair. In the past few years, Google, http://Amazon.com and Microsoft have amassed teams of in-house economists to make sense of the oceans of data they are collecting.

The trend has also been a boon for researchers handed some of the richest and largely unexamined treasure troves of human behaviour. “It used to be that if you got a PhD in economics, you went to government, you went to academics, you went to a consulting firm, or you went to Wall Street,” said Greg Rosston, deputy director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and a lecturer at the university near Palo Alto, California. “Now there’s another option.”
Full report on Independent Online site