PriceTheory

I contacted Tel Aviv last year and they told me you can't apply directly to their PhD program; you have to apply to the MA program and complete it first. That's all I know. I too would be interested in placement information from TAU or Hebrew U.

I didn't get funding (so it's basically a nice rejection). And I did ask for advice. Some people told me I had a shot because I have some good letters of recommendation. (Thank you everybody!) I'm going to take more math in the fall and try again, and I've retaken the GRE. I don't think he needs to apply to many schools ranked below 20. 3.6 is a high GPA at Chicago. Almost nobody gets above 3.7.

My Chicago GPA was 2.99, GRE (at the time I applied this year) Q780, V710, A 4.5 and I got in Boston University. I was waitlisted at Brown. You can probably do much better than that. I took some harder math courses (honors analysis, topology, etc.) but my math GPA was about 2. Whether you get into top 5, top 10, or top 15 probably has to do with how well your professors know you and what they'll say in their letters.

Would a course in Design and Analysis of Statistical Experiments be useful? I don't intend to go out and do lab or field experiments. I just want a good statistical foundation for econometrics and empirical micro.

There's an economic evaluation of teaching evaluations here: http://economics.sbs.ohio-state.edu/weinberg/SEIs.pdf

The reading list for Levitt's applied price theory course http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/econ421.html includes papers by several other economists who study the same kinds of issues as Levitt.

Robert Lucas, after explaining why we were summing over n goods rather than naming all the goods individually: "When mosquitoes have babies, they don't name them. They just give them a number. There's too damn many of them."

1. Thomas Holmes 2. Theodore Schultz 3. Claudia Goldin

I'm "other". There was no option for those of us who have actual jobs.

Most forms I've seen ask how long a professor has known you. Two weeks might look suspicious. And you don't want a letter that says, "I am a famous economist. Allow me to quote from this student's resume." Is there any more information he will add? The adcoms will already know from the grade that you did well in his course.

Munkres is such a good book. It's worth reading no matter what course you take.

I think it depends on what you did in the course. If you had to read empirical papers from the research literature or look at a lot of data, it was applied. On the other hand, in a sense all of economics is an application of basic price theory, so everything but Consumer Theory 101 could count as applied if you want it to.

Actually, there's an exception to what I just wrote. You should take the real analysis course no matter what you're interested in!

There is no one recommended background that works for everyone. You should take courses you are interested in. It looks like you want to do finance. If so, take more of that and take math courses that are directly related to it. By all means complete a math major if you love it, but don't just take more math courses as an attempt to cover the waterfront. Everyone else has the same strategy.

Did you take any computer science, or any hard sciences like physics? What kind of statistics have you taken?