PCG

I used interfolio.com, which was cheaper/better than my school's service. I found pretty much all schools accepted the interfolio service. I would just call ahead of time and ask the department. In one or two cases, I had to have my profs fill something extra out, but it wasn't a big deal.

For the most part, yes. At ucla this year, we had an intramural dodgeball team during the first quarter, and we also had intramural indoor soccer teams during second and third quarters, though with less first year participation. I typically ran 3-4 times a week during the first quarter and part of the second quarter. However, as the year wore on, it became more difficult to keep this regularity up, and I ended up running hardly at all the last several months. We have comps right after the quarter which might have been a factor making time more sparse, and at schools that have a long break before comps it might not be as hard to keep up with regular workouts. There were groups that met for weekly soccer pickup games that people would come and go/ off and on, and a handful of pickup basketball games here and there. So yeah, it isn't the same quality of sporting activity, but really, there has to be some otherwise people would go crazy. That is one of the nice things here in LA...the weather is good so when you do have time to play a game of soccer or whatever, the weather is good enough to do it.

1. To the OP...what would be done during the interim year instead of going to the top 10? This is an important variable. Also, it is very hard to evaluate this sort of thing because the labor market when you graduate is a very important factor in your career prospects. Graduating in an "up" year from a lower ranked school is probably better than graduating in a down year from a higher school. Assuming you can control for the labor market, you still have to think about what the interim year would be spent doing...working? Getting real life experience? Hiking europe/south america? These are worthwhile experiences and I would say waiting is worth it. If, rather, the time is spent doing some lame RA job for a prof or at a FED or doing some MA degree, then I would say no, it isn't worth it to wait. 2. To all the other posters except YoungEconomist and sonicskat...do you guys know how to stay focused? Not every thread needs to resolve to a discussion on rankings.

Hmmm... I'm not so sure. I mean, sure, maybe prof. Rob murdered his wife (or whatever he is accused of...I don't know), but even if that is true, does that make his evaluation invalid? (Assuming a person in jail has already written/can write the letter.) A philosopher would say no, not in a strictly logical sense. (Though in a practical sense, it seems unlikely that the adcoms would be able to completely set aside the prof's legal troubles as unrelated).

The answer is no in general, but it is true for specific types of symmetric matrices, e.g. Positive Semi-Definite, in which case C must be a square matrix http://planetmath.org/encyclopedia/CholeskyDecomposition.html

UCLA just hired a micro theorist from Bonn to start here in the fall. His name is Moritz Meyer-ter-Vehn.

Well, clearly this person does not go to ucla, since no one would consider ucla as low as number 5 public school (and analysis is called analysis here). Same with michigan. So Wisconsin or minnesota are better bets. One way or the other, little guy you've got a great profile and a great shot at a top 5. Not guaranteed of course. It really just comes down to letters as others have mentioned. Just apply to all top 10's plus a few extras and you should be set. If I were you, I wouldn't take grad linear algebra, unless you are very interested. Grad econ would be better, but I would maybe think twice about it. You could end up hurting yourself more than helping if you don't do well (and it is very hard to do well at places like minnesota or wisc.) Also, don't worry about you gpa it's fine. The claim made by someone about 3.9 is ridiculous. Also, I wouldn't bother trying to publish your paper, because it won't be a good journal and profs won't care. Good luck.

harry potter...

Why do you think this would be interesting/helpful? Everyone already knows the answer. I just don't understand why people spend so much time thinking about it.

Barring disaster on the comps...I'll be there!

Seriously, you sound like the thing you criticize Mankiw of being. You're going on and on without really making any substantive critique. Maybe when you get to davis next fall you can start doing something more constructive than spouting off left-wing propaganda on some lame web forum and start working on an alternative model that counter's Mankiw's model with actual reasoning and results. Personally, I think it is a worthy research topic, and while there are certainly areas to critique his paper (as with any paper) at least he is contributing something.

If I were you, I would call the schools and demand a refund of your application fee.

If what you say is true that no one has phd doing what you want to do, why do you think you need one? Personally, I don't see what economics has to do with submitting reimbursement claims to the government -- that sounds more like accounts receivable or something.

Why is this a mistake? It's not like OLS is different in in greene and hayashi. Anything you learn from greene is not going to contradict hayashi.

Put credit card away. Approach computer. Type "math wikipedia" into Yahoo! Seriously, though...the internet should be all you need. One of my favorites: http://mathforum.org/dr.math/ which is particularly good for high school stuff that you've forgotten, which is really important because you use, for example, the side-angle-side theorem all the time in micro. Just kidding. Maybe.