I love my job

....but I have just spent a good chunk of time doing the thing I should have done before I accepted the job--reading through the research interests of everyone on the faculty and looking at the course offerings.

I have come to the sad conclusion that my school is woefully weak in microeconomics. We did hire a promenent labor economist from an Ivy League school, which is a start, but really, he just does empirical work. Which is great, but I am an accidental theorist, and I want to talk with someone about mechanism design (which, by the way, was the subject of this year's Nobel), and there is no one here who would understand it better than I do. Which is sad, because I don't really understand it at all.

Oh, and to my horror, they teach a whole course on the economics of auditing and assurance services (out of the accounting department, no doubt) and anyone who uses the phrase "assurance services" in a course title is automatically signalling his/her ignorance about economics. So they are propagating next door everything I am fighting (pitifully) against.

Sigh.