Controversial economics discussion board back online after outage

A controversial online discussion board used by PhD students and academics in the economics field is back online after an unexplained three-week hiatus prompted speculation that it had shut for good.   

Economics Job Market Rumors (EJMR), where anonymous users gossip about jobs and university-related news, appeared to have resurfaced by 2 September after being offline throughout most of August.

Launched in 2008, it became a popular forum among economics scholars, graduate students and journalists because it offered often private information about developments within university departments. But it also became notorious for racist and misogynistic posts, particularly personal attacks, and the way women and academics from minority ethnic backgrounds were discussed on the site, also known as EconJobRumors. 

Its disappearance led to speculation that the forum had shut for good. On social media platforms such as Reddit and X, economics students and academics chimed in on its apparent demise, with some welcoming it and others arguing that, despite its toxicity, it brought to light useful information about the job market.

It is unclear why EJMR went offline. The identity of the forum’s current owner and administrators is unknown, and the site did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Florian Ederer, a professor at Boston University who has co-authored research analysing millions of posts on EJMR, said reports of its demise had proved premature but that the outage came amid a much longer decline.

“There is a trade-off between the useful information generated by anonymity and the ugly behaviour that complete anonymity coupled with little moderation facilitated. Over time, this ugly behaviour increasingly overwhelmed the informational content on EJMR,” he said.

“The site became more abusive and less focused on economics and the job market. At the same time, economists acquired many other ways of exchanging information online, so there was less reason to tolerate the toxicity in order to get the useful information.”

A 2025 report by the American Economic Association found that just 5.8 per cent of economists who responded to its survey said they currently read EJMR. The association said use of the site was trending down and that Google searches for it had been declining for about eight years.

Despite its reputation, EJMR had once been a prominent source of information for economics PhD students that was hard to get for those without strong connections, such as “which departments were interviewing, whether offers had gone out, what salaries looked like, how long journals were taking, and what was happening at other universities”, Ederer explained.  

But he added that this information was bundled together with “harassment, racism and sexism”, forcing users to “constantly wade through a cesspool of abuse and toxicity to find it”.

Research carried out by Alice Wu, now assistant professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which found that posts about women were often focused on their physical appearance or personal information, drew widespread attention in 2017 when she was an undergraduate student. 

“The decline of EJMR could be driven by a decrease in engagement from new PhD students, who are well aware of the forum’s toxicity from the beginning,” Wu said. “If there has indeed been a drop in engagement among younger economists, I see it as a positive development.”

Wu said it was difficult to know whether the decline was a sign of wider cultural change in economics or whether similar conversations had migrated elsewhere. Her study came out around the time of the #MeToo movement, when there was momentum for change in individual economics departments, she explained. “I felt lucky to enter the profession as those changes were taking place,” she said.

seher.asaf@timeshighereducation.com