Yes, "quants" tend to have undergrad math/physics backgrounds, but "quants" aren't the ones writing academic papers in the Journal of Finance. You, and many oth

Yes, "quants" tend to have undergrad math/physics backgrounds, but "quants" aren't the ones writing academic papers in the Journal of Finance. You, and many others in this thread, seem to have a painful lack of awareness that there are things called PhD programs, and that they select and train students to specifically do research. Here's an analogy: a random comp-sci undergrad/master's isn't going to be publishing in a conference any time soon. Most of you have no chance of getting into a PhD comp-sci program, just as most random econ students have no chance of getting into a PhD econ program. Both of these select heavily from mathematics. Here's the editorial board of the Journal of Finance: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1540-6261/homepage/EditorialBoard.html http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1540-62... You can feel free to check their affiliations for yourself, but almost every single person has a PhD in Economics or a PhD in Finance/Financial-Economics from a top department. PhD Finance programs are structured like PhD econ programs (you take the usual micro/macro/metrics), and were historically rooted in economics departments. And for what it's worth, almost all of them will have a bachelor's in mathematics, or a master's in mathematics, or in the case of international students, a master's in economics. The topic of this thread is about academic economics, yet you and everyone else are attacking it by citing the irrelevance of undergrad economics in the U.S.. Which we're all painfully familiar with. But believe it or not, the best aspiring comp-sci academics in the United States rarely take a full major of comp-sci courses at the undergrad level either, because U.S liberal arts majors are frankly geared towards students who have no interest in academia. This does not imply a single thing about graduate-level comp-sci, economics or finance research.