Rankings

[JosephKeith72]

Just figure out where recent ph.d.'s have placed (assuming you are interested in an academic position), especially in fields in which you are interested.

[Gerter]

Originally Posted by claphands

My advice was going to be go to repec or google scholar and see who is cited in your field and where they come from, but it hasn't worked for me: everyone writing what interests me is European or Australian for some reason and I want to study in the US*

*actually I'd love to study in Europe, but they don't have enough straight B.A. to PhD programs and I don't want to have to do a masters along the way (already have an MA in an unrelated, non quant, field)

You do realise that doing a PhD in the U.S. entails another masters as well?

[jbs02002]

Originally Posted by walt526

Minnesota is a great school if you want to study macro, but not exactly a public economics powerhouse.

Most of our macro superstars like Chari, Larry Jones and Chris Phelan do a lot of work in public econ. A lot of our top placements in recent years have also been in public. We might be weak in micro theory, but public is one of our strongest fields.

[claphands]

Originally Posted by Gerter

You do realise that doing a PhD in the U.S. entails another masters as well?

yes. the issue is the lack (with a few exceptions) of doctoral stream programs in Europe that meet my tastes, i.e. the masters are terminal so there is less funding and less of a guarantee that you could continue on to the PhD.

Unless I misunderstand the relationship between the typical MSc program in a European department and the Mphil/Phd programs

[informer]

Originally Posted by jbs02002

Most of our macro superstars like Chari, Larry Jones and Chris Phelan do a lot of work in public econ. A lot of our top placements in recent years have also been in public. We might be weak in micro theory, but public is one of our strongest fields.

Minnesota has had very strong placements in theoretical public finance, e.g., optimal taxation. Tsyvinski and Golusov are two prominent examples here; the way I've heard it, they co-authored their job-market papers together and were placed initially at Harvard and MIT.

But what they do is a world away from what a lot of people mean when they say public finance; they're not doing reduced-form natural experiments. If you want to do that kind of stuff, I don't know if Minnesota is the place for you. (Which is to say, it might be; I just don't know.)

[jbs02002]

Good point. I guess I should have specified that I meant theoretical public. If you're interested in doing any kind of reduced-form work, Minnesota is probably not the place for you.

[walt526]

Sorry, I should have been more specific than "public economics."

Minnesota obviously does great theory across the board (actually my undergrad "Public Microeconomic Theory" professor was actually a UMN PhD, fellow Spaniard with Mas-Colell back in the early 1970s)... when I through out "public economics" I was thinking more in terms of the less theoretical variations. This might be off-base, but in my mind something like optimal taxation is more along the lines of game theory development than what is normally talked about as "public economics."

[Gecko]

[quote=walt526;836371 This might be off-base, but in my mind something like optimal taxation is more along the lines of game theory development than what is normally talked about as "public economics."[/quote]

mechanism design?