Have you ever wondered exactly how many presentations I have attended since starting my PhD? I sure have. And I’ve done something about it.
Here are some plots for the seminars and brown bags that I have attended.
In the figure below, can you spot when my exchange semester began?
Breaking down my attendance by fiscal and academic year, respectively, gives the following.
Here’s my favorite figure in this section: Heatmap of day-of-week and month-year. In the fall of 2021, I was still an RA at the Swedish Institute for Social Research, while doing my first semester of the PhD; they had seminars on Tuesdays and Mondays, while my department had seminars on Thursdays. Due to coursework (and the pandemic), I didn’t attend many seminars that first semester. From my second semester onwards, I attended our usual Thursday seminar, 2–3 times a month. Beginning in February of 2023, we changed the seminar day to Wednesdays. Finally, Beginning in September of 2023, I attended the IRLE seminars every Wednesday in Berkeley, plus a bunch of other seminars spread out throughout the week!
Not surprising, most presentations are given by PhD students or APs.
I’ve had the honor of presenting a few times myself:
Econ gets a lot of crap for its gender imbalance. And it has a highly skewed gender distribution. This is looking at presenters’ genders, but the share of men would be even higher if I counted per presentation instead of per presenter (since I’ve seen some people present multiple times, and it’s mostly been men).
If you are like me*, you’ve gone around wondering the following:
Which is more popular among economists, Google Sites or Github Pages?
I don’t have a definitive answer, but use this figure to argue about it at the pub.†
* Congrats! That’s a big win. † How representative is my sample to the sample of all economists? Squarespace + Google Domains = True. Google Sites has a relative majority, but is that all that counts to declare victory? I will start campaigning to get people with no personal websites to create a Github Pages.
Uploaded 2023–11–20; Last updated 2025–06-02