In January, I posted and tweeted this:
7c6d61820d512c87789bf13a5fd16876da6d7004
which is the SHA1 hash of the following text, my prediction of the 2012 RES tour party:
Today is Thursday January 5 2012 and here are my predictions for the 2012 Review of Economics Studies Tour. Last year I made my predictions after having interviewed all of the top candidates. This year I am making my prediction only after reading job market papers and letters of recommendations and before actually meeting the candidates in an interview setting. The interviews begin tomorrow morning. We can compare my results and decide whether the interviews are informative or not.
Gabriel Carroll
Melissa Dell
Arun Chandresekher
Michal Fabinger
Paulo Somaini
Briana Chang
Treb AllenAs with last year I make these predictions not because I have tremendous confidence in them but simply as an experiment to see how easy it is to predict job market outcomes well in advance. This year I am fairly confident that I will get at least 3 right. 4 is my expected value.
You can verify this by visiting this web site, copying and pasting the prediction text and generating the SHA1 hash. If you are curious how it works, here is Wikipedia.
And here is the actual list of RES tourists selected this year:
Saki Bigio – NYU (going to Columbia GSB)
Gabriel Carroll – MIT (going to Stanford?)
Melissa Dell – MIT (Going to Harvard Society of Fellows)
Nathaniel Hendren – MIT (Going to Stanford ?)
Matteo Maggiori – Berkeley (Don’t know where he is going.)
Paulo Somaini – Stanford (Coming to Northwestern????)
Joe Vavra – Yale (Going to Chicago Booth School of Business)
As you can see I got three out of seven. Which I must say looks like a pretty poor score but hindsight is hard to shake and I made this prediction wild guess after only having read recommendation letters and job market papers. I take this as evidence that the face-to-face interviews (that happened in the days after I made this prediction) convey a lot of information. I am pretty sure I would have gotten two more if I made the prediction two days later.
More generally I would say that my miserable performance both last year and this pretty much dispells the cynical view that job market stars are minted before the market opens. If you don’t believe me, next year you try it.
Cheap Talk 
8 comments
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March 27, 2012 at 1:00 am
v15inced88@hotmail.com
You should make predictions before and after interviews the same year. Apparently you did something like that this year, if you have the subjective impression that you “would have gotten two more if I made the prediction two days later”, but you didn’t write your second set of predictions down. That impression is the main reason to think that the interviews provide additional info, so considering all of the trouble that you’re going through to make these predictions, you might as well include those updated predictions in the written record so we (and you) can verify that you have gotten two more.
Also, it would be more informative if you made a ranked list of the 15 or 20 people who you think are most likely to win, instead of just giving a list of 7 people for the 7 spots. That would provide more fine-grained data about how much information you had at the time of your prediction, compared to your list of 7 where outcome data is just “3/7”. For instance, we could look at how far up in the rankings each of the 7 winners moved after their interviews.
March 27, 2012 at 1:03 am
Anon
Please delete my previous comment (or at least my name) – I accidentally put my email address in the wrong field.
March 27, 2012 at 7:39 am
Anonymous
I can’t work out if your last paragraph is supposed to be ironic or sincere especially as those who don’t make it as tourists might be very close. That you’re repeating it from last yearMy inability to figure that out probably more than anything says something about the top of the econ market.
I guess that the issue is that I don’t have a good benchmark for what a decent prediction should be. The only other context I could think of is other top talent markets: I wonder how good early predictions are for things like NBA, NFL drafts (I guess that they exist); do they move around much?
March 27, 2012 at 6:29 pm
David Backus
Matteo Maggiori: going to NYU finance.
March 27, 2012 at 7:50 pm
Jonathan Robinson
Nathaniel Hendren; going to Harvard.
March 27, 2012 at 8:09 pm
jeff
thanks thanks
April 5, 2012 at 6:39 am
p
You also have not taken into account that some of those who picked for the tour, say no. (I know, because I did. All the travelling during my job market took a toll on my private life, so I thought it was for the best.) So you might have been actually much more accurate than you think.
July 1, 2012 at 11:44 pm
Anonymous
what is your opinion about paulo Somaini?