One additional data point: I'm approximately an associate professor of economics in North American terms. Also curious how many of us there are here. As it happens, one of my colleagues was recently hired by Amazon (quite nearly appending an extra zero to their salary in the process).

Amazon is the second largest employer of economists, behind only the Fed: https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/13/tech/amazon-economists/index....

I've talked to several big names that have told me about megaoffers from Amazon. (They probably don't care if people know, since they told me, but I'm not going to name them.)

What does an Amazon economist do?

They hire in three buckets:

- Time series forecasting.

- Reduced-form causal inference

- Structural, especially what is called "structural IO".

Among the questions people in the last category will answer are: how should we price this product? How should we decide which new markets to enter?

Quite a few, but the benefit of participating in discussions about economics on HN is less than the opportunity cost. As economics is heavily computational, HN is as natural a fit for an economics PhD as a CS PhD.

PhD economics/econometrics, ex-research economist, turned machine learning engineer. In my personal experience the mathiness in both fields are comparable, but pay-to-effort ratio was much better in machine learning.

Finished my masters in economics. Went on to do my PhD in economics but dropped by the end of the first semester. Realized it was going to be too much with a young family at the time.

Checking in. I did my PhD in polisci, but invaded.

Econ PhD here! Also IO.

Please chime in if you think anything that I said is wrong.