Purdue's strength?

[NEWHOPE]

Does anybody know about Purdue's Econ program? It seems IO? :whistle::sleepy:

[gsm33]

Dan Kovenock is moving from Purdue to U Iowa this coming year.

[puecon]

Hi, I am actually a first year student at PU. This is a small department. So if you have formed some kind of primitive preferences regarding subjects that you wan to study, you should certainly investigate whether you're going to fit here. The department is small but the number of incoming students is also small, about joined 9 last year. I think overall the environment is good to be a student here. For example, a number of professors including some senior faculty regularly co-author papers with their students. Looking through the list of working papers and publications, it looks like Aliprantis, Casson, Hummels, Naknoi, and some others regularly do this. Hummels just mentioned to the first year students that one of the papers he co-authored with a student was just accepted to JPE.

 

Regarding fields, I think I/O, Trade, and Experimental are definitely the stronger subjects here. There are 5-1 senior professors in the economics department with I/O among their primary subjects of interest. I mentioned -1 since, as the poster above already pointed out, Kovenock is apparently leaving. Even without him though, it seems like the coverage in I/O is pretty good for a department of such small size. You can still do theoretical, empirical, and experimental research in I/O here. Add to that the fact that there is an unknown number of faculty members in the Ag. Econ. department who also work in I/O. I have heard that the department might consider hiring a new professor for I/O or theory next year.

 

Trade is also fairly active. There are three professors in the econ department and an unknown (to me) number of professors in the agecon department who work in trade. The GTAP (Global Trade Analysis) project is hosted in the agecon department, which I believe has to do with computable general equilibrium modeling. The trade faculty in the econ department seems to focus on models of trade that rely on the tools of the modern I/O, so actually it's probably not a coincidence that I/O and Trade are both very active here. I have heard some regional trade conference is hosted by Purude every other summer or so.

 

Experimental is another popular field. Field courses are regularly taught by professors Cason and Casari, and there is a laboratory for experimental economics.

 

For theory, we have only two professors, Aliprantis and Novshek. However, Aliprantis seems to have worked in so many subjects that he seems like a theory department on its own. For example, in the past few years he advised or is still advising students in a broad range of subjects such as game theory, mathematical economics, general equilibrium, monetary economics, macroeconomics, and financial economics.

 

I think econometrics is going to be a decent field as well since we have two senior econometricians joining next fall semester, Justin Tobias (applied micro/Bayesian/labor) and Yong Bao (time series theory). We also have an assistant professor who works in time series (PhD from BU last year) who I believe has already published at least one paper.

 

Macro, while offered as a field, in my personal opinion is weaker than the other fields because the department has only three recently hired assistant professors. I believe a number of other fields (like public econ, labor, etc) are a possible concentration, but the faculty resources in those subjects are really thin, and IMHO there are plenty of similarly ranked departments where fields like labor, development, or public economics are represented much broader than here (by the way, I believe no one in the econ department works specifically in development, but there could be people in agecon).

 

Students are free to pick a secondary field from a related department, such as agecon, math, statistics, finance, marketing, etc. I heard that corporate finance faculty is pretty good here, and that it can actually tie pretty well with a field like I/O. As you can guess from my post, I feel pretty optimistic about this program. I intend to major in econometrics and financial markets, if I pass the prelims. BTW, my understanding is that most people pass the prelims, but you have to study very hard for them, and some people are asked to leave if they don't pass them.

[NEWHOPE]

Hi, I am actually a first year student at PU. This is a small department. So if you have formed some kind of primitive preferences regarding subjects that you wan to study, you should certainly investigate whether you're going to fit here. The department is small but the number of incoming students is also small, about joined 9 last year. I think overall the environment is good to be a student here. For example, a number of professors including some senior faculty regularly co-author papers with their students. Looking through the list of working papers and publications, it looks like Aliprantis, Casson, Hummels, Naknoi, and some others regularly do this. Hummels just mentioned to the first year students that one of the papers he co-authored with a student was just accepted to JPE.

 

Regarding fields, I think I/O, Trade, and Experimental are definitely the stronger subjects here. There are 5-1 senior professors in the economics department with I/O among their primary subjects of interest. I mentioned -1 since, as the poster above already pointed out, Kovenock is apparently leaving. Even without him though, it seems like the coverage in I/O is pretty good for a department of such small size. You can still do theoretical, empirical, and experimental research in I/O here. Add to that the fact that there is an unknown number of faculty members in the Ag. Econ. department who also work in I/O. I have heard that the department might consider hiring a new professor for I/O or theory next year.

 

Trade is also fairly active. There are three professors in the econ department and an unknown (to me) number of professors in the agecon department who work in trade. The GTAP (Global Trade Analysis) project is hosted in the agecon department, which I believe has to do with computable general equilibrium modeling. The trade faculty in the econ department seems to focus on models of trade that rely on the tools of the modern I/O, so actually it's probably not a coincidence that I/O and Trade are both very active here. I have heard some regional trade conference is hosted by Purude every other summer or so.

 

Experimental is another popular field. Field courses are regularly taught by professors Cason and Casari, and there is a laboratory for experimental economics.

 

For theory, we have only two professors, Aliprantis and Novshek. However, Aliprantis seems to have worked in so many subjects that he seems like a theory department on its own. For example, in the past few years he advised or is still advising students in a broad range of subjects such as game theory, mathematical economics, general equilibrium, monetary economics, macroeconomics, and financial economics.

 

I think econometrics is going to be a decent field as well since we have two senior econometricians joining next fall semester, Justin Tobias (applied micro/Bayesian/labor) and Yong Bao (time series theory). We also have an assistant professor who works in time series (PhD from BU last year) who I believe has already published at least one paper.

 

Macro, while offered as a field, in my personal opinion is weaker than the other fields because the department has only three recently hired assistant professors. I believe a number of other fields (like public econ, labor, etc) are a possible concentration, but the faculty resources in those subjects are really thin, and IMHO there are plenty of similarly ranked departments where fields like labor, development, or public economics are represented much broader than here (by the way, I believe no one in the econ department works specifically in development, but there could be people in agecon).

 

Students are free to pick a secondary field from a related department, such as agecon, math, statistics, finance, marketing, etc. I heard that corporate finance faculty is pretty good here, and that it can actually tie pretty well with a field like I/O. As you can guess from my post, I feel pretty optimistic about this program. I intend to major in econometrics and financial markets, if I pass the prelims. BTW, my understanding is that most people pass the prelims, but you have to study very hard for them, and some people are asked to leave if they don't pass them.

 

 

:tup:Thanks so much for so detailed introduction! It sounds like IO/FINANCE is better for me. Actually, I have to select one of the competing offers at this time. Also Purdue is a big name in my country.

 

BTW, does the department fund every entering student? Cause the funding decision has not been decided to my application.:(

[puecon]

I believe that most first year students are funded here, but some students were offered admission without first year funding in the past (this means that most have to work as TA or RA). I think that whether you get funding depends on whether people who already received admission with funding will decline their offers.

[NEWHOPE]

Thanks, PUECON! I just talked with my professor in my current program, he highly recommended PU as well!