Being an Economist?!?

nauru
Wed, 09 Apr 2008 09:11:38 +0000

Economists also work at investment banks. The 4 main functions in Global Markets are Trading, Structuring, Sales, and Research. People employed in fixed income research are basically economists. They have to constantly know exactly what is happening in their specific area of the markets, and have a good idea of what might happen next, how various market actors react to various phenomena, etc. However, trading is also heavily rooted in economics, if you are trading anything but plain old equities. (fixed income is generally considered much more analytical and intellectually demanding than equities).

The investment banking division includes corporate finance and M&A. These guys spend most of their time crunching numbers in excel, searching for spelling mistakes in pitchbooks, and creating powerpoint presentations.

Typically you find more business and finance majors going into the Investment Banking Division as powerpoint/excel jocks, and more economics/math/physics/engineering majors going into the Markets division as traders, structurers or researchers.

Economists can also work for government (fiscal economics, macroeconomics, monetary economics, regional economics, economic policy analysis, public economics, labour economics) or international organisations (international trade, international economics, econometrics), large corporations in industry (game theory, industrial organisation microeconomics) or academia (all subfields mentioned above, plus history of economic thought, economic history, and economic methodology).

If you don’t know what all the subfields are, google them. Useful tidbit: Economics majors have higher average starting salaries than business or finance majors.