Education
Professor of Economics and Finance
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Professors of Economics and Finance teach undergraduate and graduate courses covering economic theory, financial markets, corporate finance, and quantitative methods at colleges and universities. Beyond the classroom, they conduct original research, publish in peer-reviewed journals, advise graduate students, and contribute to departmental governance. The role demands equal parts teacher, researcher, and scholar — with tenure status and institutional type shaping how those demands are weighted.
Role at a glance
- Typical education
- PhD in economics, finance, or closely related field
- Typical experience
- Entry-level (PhD required) with research pipeline
- Key certifications
- None typically required
- Top employer types
- Research universities, liberal arts colleges, business schools, regional comprehensive universities
- Growth outlook
- Structurally tight; tenure-track positions are flat to declining at most institutions
- AI impact (through 2030)
- Mixed — forcing fundamental reassessment of introductory teaching and assessment methods, while creating increased demand for faculty specializing in machine learning and computational economics.
Duties and responsibilities
- Teach 2–4 courses per semester in economics or finance, including lectures, seminars, and graduate workshops
- Design syllabi, course materials, and assessments aligned with departmental learning outcomes and accreditation standards
- Conduct original research in economics or finance and submit work to peer-reviewed journals in the field
- Advise and mentor graduate students through dissertation proposals, fieldwork, and final defense preparation
- Serve on departmental, college, and university committees including curriculum, hiring, and tenure review committees
- Apply for and manage external research grants from NSF, SSRC, or private foundations to fund research programs
- Present research findings at national and international academic conferences in economics and finance
- Provide academic advising to undergraduate majors on course selection, internships, and post-graduation plans
- Engage with industry partners, policy organizations, and media as a subject-matter expert in economics or finance
- Maintain active office hours and timely feedback on student work throughout the academic semester
Overview
A Professor of Economics and Finance occupies one of the most intellectually demanding positions in higher education — expected to contribute original knowledge to the discipline while simultaneously training the next generation of economists, analysts, and financial professionals. The job title is singular, but the role is three jobs running in parallel: teacher, researcher, and academic citizen.
In the classroom, the work spans introductory microeconomics for freshmen all the way to doctoral seminars on asset pricing theory or macroeconomic modeling. A typical course load at a research university is two courses per semester — one undergraduate survey course and one upper-division or graduate elective in the professor's specialty. At teaching-focused liberal arts colleges or regional comprehensive universities, loads of four courses per semester are common, leaving significantly less time for research.
Outside the classroom, the research agenda is the defining axis of a tenure-track career. A junior faculty member hired in a macroeconomics or corporate finance position is expected to arrive with a working paper pipeline and to convert those papers into publications within the six-year tenure clock. The process is slow and uncertain: a paper submitted to a top journal can spend 18 months in review, collect two rounds of revisions, and still receive a rejection. Managing that uncertainty while teaching, advising, and serving on committees requires real discipline.
The service component is genuinely consuming — departmental hiring decisions, curriculum reviews, accreditation self-studies, and university senate obligations don't wait for a convenient moment in the research calendar. Experienced faculty learn to budget service commitments carefully; junior faculty often underestimate them.
The reward structure is front-loaded toward patience. The academic job market is brutal, the pre-tenure period is high-stakes, and the salary trajectory is slower than industry alternatives for the first 10 years. What the role offers in return is unusual: intellectual freedom to pursue questions that genuinely interest you, the platform to influence how students understand markets and policy, and, once tenure is granted, a level of job security that almost no other profession provides.
Qualifications
Education:
- PhD in economics, finance, financial economics, or a closely related field required for tenure-track positions
- Strong doctoral placement record from the graduating program matters for initial hiring at research universities
- JD/MBA combinations occasionally considered for law-and-finance or accounting-adjacent roles at business schools
Research credentials:
- Working paper pipeline with at least one paper under journal review at time of hire
- Demonstrated specialization in a recognized subfield: labor economics, behavioral finance, monetary economics, empirical asset pricing, development economics, corporate governance
- Evidence of conference presentations at AEA, AFA, WFA, or equivalent venues
Teaching qualifications:
- Graduate teaching assistant experience covering at least one full semester of solo instruction
- Familiarity with both theory-heavy and empirical course formats
- Experience designing problem sets, exams, and course materials from scratch rather than inheriting them
Technical skills:
- Econometrics: familiarity with Stata, R, or Python for empirical work; structural modeling or reduced-form causal inference methods
- Finance-specific: options pricing models, portfolio theory, factor models (Fama-French), fixed income analytics
- Data sources: CRSP, Compustat, WRDS, Federal Reserve microdata, BLS public use files
- Growing expectation of machine learning literacy: regularization methods, natural language processing for textual analysis
Professional attributes:
- Ability to write clearly for both academic and policy audiences
- Willingness to participate in departmental governance without treating it as a distraction
- Mentorship instincts toward graduate students — not just advising on research mechanics but on career navigation
- Genuine subject-matter curiosity that sustains a research program through slow publication cycles
Accreditation context: Business school departments operate under AACSB accreditation standards, which impose specific requirements on faculty qualifications. Academically Qualified (AQ) status typically requires a terminal degree and recent peer-reviewed output. Professionally Qualified (PQ) status is available for faculty with significant industry experience and can broaden hiring pools at practice-oriented schools.
Career outlook
The academic labor market for economists and finance faculty is structurally tight and unlikely to loosen significantly over the next decade. The pipeline of PhD graduates from top programs has grown modestly, while tenure-track position creation has been flat to declining at most institutions. The result is a buyer's market at the institution level and a difficult job search experience for most new PhDs.
That said, the picture varies considerably by subfield and institution type. Finance faculty with quantitative empirical backgrounds — particularly those who can credibly work on fintech, climate finance, or machine learning applications in asset pricing — are in stronger demand than the overall market suggests. Development economists and labor economists with field experiment experience remain competitive. Macroeconomists outside top-10 programs face the most challenging placement environment.
Several structural forces are reshaping the role itself. Online education has expanded access to economics content, creating competitive pressure on general survey courses while increasing the premium on advanced and specialized instruction that cannot be replicated by a YouTube lecture. Large language models are forcing fundamental reassessment of how introductory economics is taught and assessed — the problem sets that defined Econ 101 for 30 years are not a durable format when students have access to AI tools that solve them in seconds.
On the research side, the interdisciplinary turn is accelerating. The line between economics and data science, between finance and computer science, and between economic policy research and machine learning is blurring in ways that create opportunities for faculty who can operate across those boundaries. Grant funding from NSF, NBER, and private foundations increasingly goes to projects that combine economic questions with computational methods.
For those who enter the profession, the career ceiling is high. A senior professor with a strong publication record, a funded research program, and consulting relationships with government agencies or financial institutions can earn total compensation well above the stated salary range while maintaining the intellectual independence that drew them to academia in the first place. The path is long and the competition is real, but the destination remains one of the more intellectually rewarding career outcomes available to quantitatively trained social scientists.
Sample cover letter
Dear Search Committee,
I am writing to apply for the tenure-track position in Economics and Finance at [University]. I will complete my PhD in Financial Economics at [University] in May, working under [Advisor Name], and I will be available to join the department in the fall semester.
My primary research field is empirical asset pricing, with a secondary interest in corporate finance. My job market paper, "Institutional Ownership Dynamics and the Transmission of Monetary Policy Shocks," uses CRSP-Compustat merged data and a shift-share instrument to identify how mutual fund rebalancing activity amplifies the equity market response to unexpected Fed funds rate changes. The paper is currently under review at the Journal of Financial Economics. A second project examines the cross-sectional pricing of climate transition risk using carbon intensity data matched to quarterly earnings calls — I expect a working paper version to be circulated by December.
I have taught independently as primary instructor for an undergraduate Investments course for two semesters and served as TA for doctoral-level Asset Pricing for three years. My teaching evaluations have averaged 4.6/5.0 across all sections. I have redesigned the Investments course to incorporate a Python-based portfolio construction module, which has improved both student engagement and demonstrated quantitative skills in the recruiting cycle.
I am drawn to [University]'s department because of the strength of its empirical finance group and its commitment to undergraduate research opportunities. I believe my research program complements the existing work in [specific area], and I would welcome the chance to contribute to the department's graduate sequence.
My complete application materials — including research papers, teaching evaluations, and three letters of recommendation — are available through [platform]. I look forward to speaking with you at the ASSA meetings in January.
[Your Name]
Frequently asked questions
- What degree is required to become a Professor of Economics and Finance?
- A PhD in economics, finance, or a closely related field is the standard requirement for tenure-track positions at four-year institutions. ABD (all but dissertation) candidates are sometimes hired with the expectation of completing the degree within one to two years. Teaching-focused institutions and community colleges may hire instructors with a master's degree, but those roles are typically non-tenure-track.
- What is the difference between an assistant, associate, and full professor?
- Assistant professor is the entry-level tenure-track rank, typically lasting six years before a tenure review. If tenured, the faculty member is promoted to associate professor. Full professor is the senior rank, reached after additional years of sustained research and service contributions. Each promotion requires a formal review of teaching, research, and service portfolios by internal and external reviewers.
- How important is publication record for tenure in economics and finance?
- Extremely important at research universities. The informal standard at R1 institutions is two to three publications in top-tier journals — journals like the American Economic Review, Journal of Finance, or Review of Financial Studies — before a tenure case is submitted. The quality of the outlet often matters more than the quantity of papers. Teaching-focused schools weight publications less heavily and give more credit to course development and student outcomes.
- How is AI and machine learning changing economics and finance research and teaching?
- AI tools are reshaping both sides of the job. On the research side, machine learning methods have become standard for empirical work in asset pricing, labor economics, and text analysis of financial disclosures. Faculty who cannot engage with these methods are at a disadvantage in both publication and grant competitions. On the teaching side, students using large language models for problem sets and papers has forced faculty to redesign assessments toward oral defenses, in-class exercises, and multi-stage projects that are harder to automate.
- What is the academic job market like for economics and finance PhDs?
- The market is highly competitive and operates on a fixed annual cycle — applications go out in the fall, flyouts happen in January, and offers come before the ASSA meetings deadline in February. Finance PhDs have stronger outside options in industry, which keeps academic salaries in finance elevated. Economics PhDs face a tighter market but have paths into policy institutions, central banks, and consulting. Placement record of the doctoral program matters enormously for initial hiring outcomes.
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