ssendam

It's true, the theory market is tough. If you're bored, download one of the AEA job market listings (e.g. JOE Listings - November 2011 ), filter based on field, and count up the number of openings.

Neither course will be particularly useful for econ. PDEs if I had to choose.

Possible, but highly unlikely. You basically have to be a genius, or already have a paper in the pipeline right now, before you even get in.

At the top schools, probably most students have seen it. At my school (around 30th) most had not. You'll get a chance to learn it, but it's tricky to pick up, especially when you're trying to learn some actual macro at the same time. It doesn't hurt to brush up beforehand. If you're planning on doing theory or serious macro, it will help a lot in understanding what's going on.

From Brad de Long's blog, the final exam to Econ 202b (one of their core macro courses). Needless to say, most schools aren't like this...

Dunno how "behavioral" this is, but one of Rogoff & Obstfeld's "six puzzles" of international economics is the "home asset bias" puzzle, i.e. investors don't seem to diversify into foreign assets. Some people try to explain this with trade costs, but a more obvious solution to me seems to be "ambiguity aversion" - I have no clue about what's going on in foreign markets, so I'll stick to a market where I know the probability distributions.

Macro is kinda funny, the stuff that can be done with algebra, doesn't really need anything more, and the stuff that does need more, is a whole different ballgame, mathematically speaking - basically everything in grad macro requires dynamic optimization, no way around it. One of the problems with Romer's book is that it teases you with all these results, but you can't actually derive them unless you know how to do dynamic optimization (which the book doesn't teach you). That said, I found "Macroeconomic Theory:A Dynamic General Equilibrium Approach" by Wickens to be a decent "roadmap" to graduate-level macro.

Models with credit and financial intermediaries are picking up (for obvious reasons). Here's a page that shows what Stanford students are reading these days: Stanford Reading Group

Seen at Mark Thoma's blog: Economist's View: "The Financial Crisis and the Systemic Failure of Academic Economics" About the remedies proposed (stimulus, bank nationalization, the Fed buying up assets, etc.) And DSGE models...

Can anyone recommend an overview or textbook of how structural modeling is used nowadays? When I hear the word "structural" it brings to mind 1) old-style macroeconometric models, 2) structural VARs, and 3) IO. Anything else?

In case you didn't have enough to worry about: Job Market for Economists Turns ... Dismal - WSJ.com

Someone with some free time should collect all the Jesus profiles we've seen over the years - that would really boost everyone's self-esteem.

Now even the labor economists are getting in on it. Are you gonna take this lying down, macroeconomists??? On the Failure of Macroeconomists - Freakonomics Blog - NYTimes.com

Ha, did anyone think they'd see the day when people (aside from macro students) would actually start paying attention to the freshwater-saltwater split. Ironically, the even the "neo-Keynesians" aren't very Keynesian in that they pay little attention to fiscal policy. I personally think that this crisis shows there is something fundamental to macro that is orthogonal to the salt vs. fresh division, that both sides are missing. Now if I could only figure out what it was...

Now try to relate this to what you learn in first-year macro.