buckykatt

Hi, aliasaurus. Sorry I missed your question before the decision date, but if you still have any questions about UConn, feel free to drop me a PM. I just finished my second year of the PhD program at UConn. I can tell you that our department has done a good job of weathering the state budget storm so far. We were down a few professors for a while, so the grad students picked up some of the workload, but we have 4-5 new hires starting this fall. And our funding has remained very good compared to the cost of living in the Storrs area. (Plus there are opportunities to teach over wintersession and summer terms.) Also, the department just made a change to the requirements that will affect you if you're starting this year: the field exam has been eliminated in favor of a field paper. The idea is that this will help students start focusing in on their dissertation topic earlier, which IMHO is a good idea. (Of course, you still have to take prelims in micro and macro.)

Nice summary, Team3. I'm currently 41 and in my second year of a PhD program, and most of the above resonates with me. In particular, point #8 (about considering larger programs that may be less risk-averse) is a good one. I applied to many small programs during a particularly bad application cycle, and I wonder whether I would have received better results (i.e. funding) by including more large programs. OTOH, I'm pretty happy where I am right now. And I should note that, for whatever reason, my cohort here at UConn includes a couple other students around my age; older applicants should not despair!

I can't speak to Nicholson, but J&R is definitely a good book and should be pretty good for self-study. I'm also a fan of Kreps, and the way he breaks advanced material into small print sections might make it useful for self-study. If I may make an unconventional recommendation, McCloskey's out-of-print intermediate text (The Applied Theory of Price) would be an excellent way to consolidate your knowledge of the theory without getting bogged down in mathematics. I honestly think that someone who worked through the entire book would have a better intuitive grasp of price theory than most 2nd-year PhD students. Download it free at Deirdre McCloskey: Books

If you've written a research paper you're proud of, then give them a copy of that, too.

I wouldn't say that analysis, per se, is necessary. But knowing how to read/write proofs in general is important.

IDEAS: Economics and Finance Research

Here's my honest advice: get your girlfriend to marry you and then make the sacrifices necessary for her career to succeed so she can support you in style. She's probably going to make much better money than you no matter which school you pick, so the opposite arrangement doesn't make much sense. And each of you committing halfway isn't going to work, either. If that doesn't sound like it's worth the cost/risk, then pick whatever is best for you on the assumption that you won't stay together. (Maybe a miracle will happen and you will, of course.)

Substituting more math and statistics courses for stuff like marketing, accounting, and management is a win. No contest.

I can't say anything useful about the comparison between schools, but as a PhD student in the Econ department at UConn, I can say that the ARE program looks pretty good. As at many schools, you would take some core courses over here in the Econ department, and have the option to supplement the ARE offerings in your fields. In particular, Prof. Segerson seems to be very active in environmental econ and I hear that she's a great teacher. We also have a two course IO sequence that's more theoretical than what's offered in the ARE department (though probably only the first of those courses would be of interest to someone in ARE). If you're more into empirical work, note that in addition to the courses offered in ARE and Econ, UConn also has a good and very active Statistics department.

Amazon does a lot more than sell books. For example: Amazon Web Services

Personally, I found Sargent's older book (Dynamic Macroeconomic Theory) easier to start with than LS. Judging by its current used price, I'm not alone.

Ah, but there's good reason to suspect that the private return and the social return aren't the same in this case... ;)

I doubt it helps much, if at all, for admission. As far as tuition, most funded offers will include a tuition waiver, so unless you're attending without funding, again no help.

It's all optimization...

You might want to consider doing a master's in economics, or at least applying to some master's programs as a backup plan. Not only might it improves your chances at admission to a good PhD program, you might get a better idea of whether you really want to pursue a PhD in economics.

My sense is that being a woman or "minority" will not help much, if at all, with admission; but it may help a great deal with being awarded funding.

A more interesting question might be, what is the potential return to further advances in economics?

I suspect that one of the most difficult adjustments for many folks here to make will be going from an undergrad experience where they could reasonably expect to get a perfect score on their exams and other work to one where problem sets and exams pose problems difficult enough that they may fail even to complete them. Undergrads are rarely pushed to their limits; grad students are expected to confront theirs.

Good advice above. Intermediate micro plus intermediate macro seems to be the ante. More is better, but not at the cost of poor math preparation. If you're motivated and have a solid math background, skipping the intro courses might well be feasible; or your school might have an intensive/survey intro course you could take in place of the standard two-course sequence. It's difficult to say whether grad macro would be better than, say, an upper-division undergrad course like international trade; I'd probably choose based on interest and the possibility of a good LOR from the instructor.

Given your level of prep, I'd not expect micro or metrics to be challenging for you because of the math. The only suggestion I'd make is to be sure you're up-to-date on your linear algebra basics--don't know about you, but that stuff leaves my head as soon as I stop using it for a month or two...

Dixit is a good book and on the easy side vs., say, Madden's Concavity & Optimization in Economics. It's roughly at the same level as Varian, I guess, but it's a much smaller book focused on math, not microeconomics in general, so it's a nice place to start before tackling Varian, MWG, or the like.

Yes, Blaug is more of a reference than a captivating read. Some other random suggestions for relevant and more interesting reading: George Stigler's Economist as Preacher essay collection; Arjo Klamer's Conversations with Economists; David Colander's The Changing Face of Economics; anything by Dierdre/Donald McCloskey. These are as much, or more, about methodology as history of thought, but it's hard to separate the two.

I second both of the above recommendations. Another great (& free!) source for an introduction to proofs is MIT's OpenCourseWare notes for the Discrete Math course, e.g. MIT OpenCourseWare | Electrical Engineering and Computer Science | 6.042J Mathematics for Computer Science, Spring 2005 | Home

Blaug's Economic Theory in Retrospect is the bog-standard reference for history of thought. Another good approach would be to go read the various Nobel prize lectures (free online) and the annual addresses from past president of the AEA (published in the AER, IIRC). Ultimately, though, there's no substitute for reading the actual literature. It's very easy to figure out which are the really big papers just by looking at citation counts on a service like JSTOR.

Ceteris paribus, UW over Davis ARE without a doubt.