gsm33

no. i do not mean placements better than cornell's standards. i mean placements that are the best according to cornell's standards over the last 5-10 years. one concrete example (and i will be happy to discuss more in a PM, but not in public given the rules of the forum) is the recent UMiami placement. first year unfunded american was close to the top cornell student on the market (if not the top) in that year and performed well as per cornell's recent history. this is not a claim that the student did outstandingly well or anything like that relative to any comparison with other programs. the TA work can be heavy. some people manage it well enough (the Miami person is an example who had a TAship years 2-5, though was also awarded a one semester RAship with little work) and others do not. i don't know what the trick is.

as suggested by a few people, you should contact eric about the funding bit. it is usually the case that you get funding in the second year and thereafter if you pass the qualifiers (i have heard of no cases where this did not happen). if you are an international (and i can imagine giving a 5 year assurance of funds can be very hard in this case), you should still check with eric on what past international admits in similar situations have done. as someone else pointed out, the funding assurance you have to give is primarily for admin purposes to process the admission and visa papers. it is very very unlikely you will need to fund yourself after year 1. i don't think anyone -- DGS or eric -- can guarantee you TA/ RA funding after year 1 if you pass the qualifiers, but it is almost zero probability that you will not get funding. As pointed elsewhere, there is a significant demand for TAs in Cornell undergrad econ (and PAM, AEM, etc.) depts and you should be fine. on a slightly positive note, some of the people who've done well (relative to cornell's standards etc.) in the phd and the job market in the last 2-3 years came into year 1 unfunded and worked their way to the top (or close enough) in the program. i can remember a few US americans and a some internationals who did this. PM me for more detailed info. but taking all this trouble would be worth it only depending on what your other funded options are and what attracts you to cornell etc. again i'm happy to discuss this over PM.

i dunno about law and econ phd programs per se, but i think several top schools' econ phd allow for law econ as a primary field (often tied to contract theory?). you may want to check out the book `the law and economics of irrational behavior' ed. by parisi and vernon smith for people working on behavioral law and econ (there are other books also, a google search should give you a good list), cass sunstein, eric posner are some names in the area i think.

NWU 2009 placements (to date) are available on p2 of the grad newsletter

agreed. NYU is the choice.

whoops sorry, i did not mean to suggest cornellec11's message was nonsense, rather that the previous thread i alluded to degenerated very soon and i wanted to be careful to avoid that. from cornellec11's response, i guess i wasnt successful. apologies, i did not mean anything about your comment being nonsense, in fact i agree with it being part of the reason for cornell's current state.

from cornellec11 "regarding the alumni list, blank spaces, at least for 2007 and 2008 mean no job by the time the list was compiled. there is only way to interpret that... " thats actually not true, a number of people don't report their placement to eric maroney, this changed a bit in 2008 when mitra actively made sure everyone did indicate where they are going, but holes don't indicate people don't have jobs 99% of the cases, more that they did not tell maroney for reasons i don't really know. i have a feeling of deja vu regarding your other comments. there was a `nasty' thread on cornell sometime back with someone called `Appl2007' on one side and another cornellian and me on the other. your words seem to echo `Appl2007'. since that thread degenerated quickly into nonsense, i'll try to avoid it as much as i can. but my take on the placement is that its about 50% due to what you're saying (not very hot research for some faculty, relatively unknown / underperforming junior and sometimes senior faculty, though if you're arguing that coate / hong/ blume-easley / barrett / huang / o'hara for example are not doing work that gets published well, thats a bit odd honestly) and 50% due to what rvalchev pointed out: broadly that unlike several similar programs rochester / penn state and even duke there is very little effort into preparing students for the market and pushing them into the right schools / jobs, i mean people are pushed at chicago / mit when they have absolutely no hope, which has a knock on effect of creating the impression that cornell grads are no good. they aren't good for top 5 / 10 most of the time, but good enough for top 20/30 often, but miss out on that since there is no clarity in indicating to the market `where the person really fits'. o'donoghue has made noises about getting things more streamlined, but i don't see it as happening soon or significantly. so things may improve slightly, but i don't see any top10 placements anytime soon. more likely an improvement in the top20/30 range with one or two extra people getting in. i repeat that wisc and duke at the moment seem to have significantly higher top 10 probability for the top student(s). for the average guy, i'd say the 3 places are the same (nb. rvalchev is clearly not an average guy :) )

i'm not entirely sure what you mean by the inter-disciplinary approach. cornell's phd econ faculty is drawn from various depts (rough estimate of 80-odd `economists' in campus). any person admitted to the econ phd can have any person on the phd program faculty as the chair. other members (usually 2 others, but more are often chosen) can be anyone from anywhere (including outside cornell) in principle, though of course with the agreement of the chair in practice. if you mean whether people working in gender / family collaborate / coordinate with people in sociology etc. the answer is sometimes they do, but i don't think there is any established formal arrangement. eg. this year some development students started a student development seminar with non-econ students (sociology, pub admin, etc.). also if you are working with faculty whose primary appointment is PAM, ILR, then i think you can interact with other non-econ faculty in those depts fairly well, though i can't think of examples at the moment. if you are asking about the end result of academic placement. a lot has already been said about cornell econ phd placement and you can get more info from the links 'Alumni' (alumni list from 1983 to date with advisors, fields, and in most cases first placement) and `Placement 2008'. some decent placements to non-econ depts have happened like to UMN's education dept sometime back etc., but i don't think there is any visible trend. placement to policy institutes is more common, but again unfortunately there is no clear trend. the benefits of an interdisciplinary approach are perhaps clear, but a couple of downsides are that you will have to be very careful of who you are on the market and indeed what market you are targetting. unfortunately, cornell has a very relaxed econ phd program which makes for a nice 5-6 years of the phd, but can prove harmful afterward. so you need to decide what your end goal is before you get too involved with interdisciplinary stuff. bottomline, i'd say its not too hard to do interdisciplinary work at cornell, and advisors are around who will be happy to chair, but the end result / benefit is not clear (at least not to me).

is russ cooper leaving ut austin?

err... sorry if i missing the point, but rvalchev, is this info not detailed enough for your purposes: and ? apologies, i know this is not a cornell thread, but its in response to r's comment before.

small additions / amendments (?) to cornellec11's post. Ming Huang is another senior behavioral prof (albeit behvioral finance) and was involved with the student who placed to Rotman in Toronto from the econ phd. plus the b-school has other behavioral / exptl finance profs. who take econ students albeit workng only in finance. coate does work with students: cotton, vanberg, dellis in the last few years plus other persons he advised but did not chair. same with kanbur. (i agree placements are hardly great though). for econometrics if hong is around, his students have done okay recently (indiana, upitt/rochester), but his style is `very specific'. pam / ilr on occassion do well, but usually not in placing to regular econ dept: someone was placed to umn education dept sometime back for example. overall, placements are poor given the faculty (cornellec11 is quite right on that count), as already pointed out elsewhere cornell is a top-30ish program with top-20ish faculty. small corrections to cornellec11's post. Ming Huang is another senior behavioral prof (albeit behvioral finance) and was involved with the student who placed to Rotman in Toronto from the econ phd. plus the b-school has other behavioral / exptl finance profs. who take econ students albeit workng only in finance. coate does work with students: cotton, vanberg, dellis in the last few years plus other persons he advised but did not chair. same with kanbur. (i agree placements are hardly great though). for econometrics if hong is around, his students have done okay recently (indiana, upitt/rochester), but his style is `very specific'. pam / ilr on occassion do well, but usually not in placing to regular econ dept: someone was placed to umn education dept sometime back for example. overall, placements are poor given the faculty (cornellec11 is quite right on that count), as already pointed out elsewhere cornell is a top-30ish program with top-20ish faculty. forgot to add. wisc certainly seems to have a higher top placement probability. duke (based on feedback from current / former faculty) has of late done a very good job of nurturing those who underplaced for the PhD (nekipelov chaired by han hong, bajari for example) and seems to be rising, but comparing the placement of the average students may be also helpful.

No behavioral at Princeton is a misleading statement. They have Benabou, Brunnermeier, Xiong (last two are finance rather than economics admittedly). You'd be better off taking a look at the past placements in your areas of interest at these places (there is a lot of discussion here suggesting Stanford Econ is not doing as well in placing people as one might think for example).

cornell's micro theory has a higher bent toward decision theory / Gen Eq / Finance compared to Wisc which has a much higher Game Theory slant. Theory placements from Wisc have had more / higher outcomes in the very top schools compared to Cornell. though Cornell is not too bad / similar in terms of top 20 - top 50 placement (if you're one of the top cornell candidates in your year). the behavioral group at cornell is growing (o'donoghue, benjamin in econ, huang, ben ho, etc. in B-school), don't think there is one at wisc (or at least a big one). one of this year's cornell candidates (liyan yang) went to finance mkt as beh. fin. and had flyouts to michigan, berkeley, toronto among others. econometrics wisc seems stronger (canay going to nwu recently etc.), cornell seems weaker at the moment though molinari is now tenured (does identification, manski student), kiefer is around, hong (non-linear time series, financial econometrics) has placed people to indiana, upitt (then rochester within one year) recently. guess i'm not making an explicit reccomendation, but more info may be useful to you. on average, wisc seems to have higher possibility of a really top school placement if you do well compared to cornell, but the average student placement (over last 1-2 years at least) seems similar.

i think you're mixing up getting the PhD degree and getting a job. several times people get a job in year XXXX, but their degrees are awarded in XXXX+1 coz they defend / submit after the 1 august XXXX deadline to get the degree in year XXXX. that does [edit: deleted `not'] exclude that there are cases of 6 (or possibly more) years for the PhD but not more than 1-2 every 3-4 years. also some people have funding/offers from home country / non-Cornell source and join public policy (or similar places) without submitting which shows up in (artificially) elongated PhD time. of course, there is a question of why delays are allowed by the PhD advisors. i don't have a good answer, except that several PhD advisors are heavily involved in non-academia or policy work and have a relaxed attitude towards matters (which is in some ways a bad thing of course). more broadly there is a fairly relaxed attitude toward the PhD in Cornell, which is attractive for some reasons, but has led to things being not so great over the last 10-15 years. there is some talk and action toward tightening the program over the last 3-4 years which is reflected in a slightly improved placement situation in terms of more top-10 / 20 / 30 interviews or flyouts, but of course not yet as much in terms of offers. this year's market did seem better conditioning on the budget constraints on hiring. some people got good interviews and almost or actual flyouts which did not turn into anything more since univs cancelled positions due to budget cuts. anyway, the larger point that good placements have to actually show up is valid and fingers crossed that this will happen in the `near' future. on the ranking i'd agree that on only faculty its a top 15/20 place but the PHD program is a top 25/30 place.

For a look at how useful LP can be in economics look at Joe Ostroy's work in ECMA, AER, JET, ET, among others. Having said that NLP is by far the more dominant tool in economics as others have already stated.

i may be missing the point, but the use of information = sigma algebra is standard given the mathematics (measure theory), maybe thats why it is not explicitly mentioned. what other formal notions of information are there? I'm not sure Stokey-Lucas is the best place for this (i'm not a macroeconomist btw) instead Sargent's texts may be more appropriate or you could start with his AEA presidential address on 'Evolution and intelligent design' for instance, which is available on his NYU web page.

being at the autonoma also gives you easy access to the faculty at the IAE for research supervision and collaboration. The IAE people (Brandt, Aragones, etc.) often chair PhD committees for the Autonoma students. Marcet (macro) is at the IAE. I think one obvious advantage of the Autonoma over UC3M is that being there gives you (easy) access to more or less all the economists in Barcelona (UPF, IAE, UAB, IESE, etc.).

Part V of post. Claim 5. The PhD students from AEM, PAM, Finance, Econ are segregated / separated in some way. False. The programs are distinct in terms of administrative details, requirements from students, funding, etc. However, students from all these programs who share common research interests (for example, development) have access to similar resources for research (ie faculty for advising, courses, etc.). These students usually take the same (advanced) courses on their area of interest and on ocassion work with each other on research. Students also take core economics courses together in the first year of their PhD. PS. I will update this post / thread if more information that meets the 'public / objective' criteria is available on these claims or ones not addressed here.

Part IV of post. Claim 4. Blank spots on the almuni list imply the student had no offer of employment before graduating. False. As explained above, all students who look for a job (any job) have an offer of employment (from some organization, not necessarily their most preferred ones) before graduating. A blank spot simply means that the student did not inform the grad field secy of the offer of employment she / he accepted before graduating (the exception being where a student chose not to look for a job for faily reasons - one instance on the list). [This is based heavily on IM for the pre-2000 years]

Part III of post. (contd from claim 3) The Econ PhD program provides a complete list of alumni from 1983 on its web page (links not posting, but available at http://www.arts.cornell.edu/econ/mainwindow.shtml under Graduate Program). There have been claims that the number of students is 'regularly' a fourth or similar fraction of the graduating cohort recently. This seems inconsistent with the data on the list, students do appear more than once, but the number is usually one or two from a year, when it does happen.

Part II of post. Claim 3. Students from the Econ PhD program do not find a job on when they go on the market, so they go on the market again in a year or so. False. Students are allowed to use the placement service once and only once while in the PhD program. The PhD program also offers its past grads the chance to make use of the placement service once more after they graduate. [Note: using the placement service means that the field assists / takes care of all logistics like collecting reference letters, mailing applications containing confidential material (like letters), mailing them, etc. It also means the student is listed on the job market list on Cornell's web page] Every student who graduates does so with a job (note: this does not imply that the job is one the student 'targeted', merely that anyone who graduates does with an offer of employment in hand). For the Econ PhD program at Cornell 'an offer of employment' includes tenure-track academic offers, post-doctoral or visiting position offers, international organization or private sector offers, etc.

This post is intended to clarify / correct claims made about the Economics PhD program at Cornell in recent threads, while avoiding the distracting statements that some of those contain. Hopefully, this will also serve the purpose of helping prospective students who are thinking of whether or not to apply to Cornell's Econ PhD program. Almost all information provided here is available publicly on Cornell's web site, or can be obtained / verified by contacting the graduate field assistant or director of grad studies for economics at Cornell. In some cases, the information is based on 'institutional memory' aka info from current / past grads, individual faculty, etc. When this is so, it is indicated by IM next to the statement. This post is expressly meant provide information that is not based on personal opinion and also point to the different sources of information on the program for anyone interested. Some claims are not addressed / mentioned here since confirming / refuting / modifying those will either entail information that is personal or be based on personal opinion, neither of which is the intent of this post. Claim 1. The Dept of Economics is the same as the PhD program in Economics at Cornell. False. The Dept of Economics is the unit that runs the undergrad program at Cornell, not the grad program. The PhD program is a superset of the dept of economics comprising 5 units at Cornell. FOr details, please see Cornell University Graduate School -- Economics. In addition to faculty, the graduate students are also supported by TAships and RAships in all 5 units. PS. Similarly, the structures of the PAM, AEM, Finance, etc. Master's/PhD programs are described by the respective entry on Cornell University Graduate School -- Fields of Study Catalog Claim 2. The faculty in the PhD program in economics are only those in the Econ Dept. False. As clearly described in the grad field description linked above, students in the Economics PhD program are free to speak / work with faculty not part of the dept of economics. The list of faculty in the grad field of economics represent those whom Econ PhD students can choose as chair of the thesis committee. Students are free to have members not listed in the grad field of economics or even those not faculty at Cornell as members of the thesis committee [for example, students in political economy (development) may have someone from the dept of govt at Cornell (the World Bank) serve on their committees]

he was even president of the club for a while!!!! that is cool. Champions

ahh... it starts again. well, whatever anyone's opinion of the placements and reappearances on placement lists at Cornell, I have no comment on. However, here is a fact (meaning it can be checked with the Grad Field Secy at Cornell): the placements that were mentioned here have both been very restricted in location and sectors due to personal / family joint location constraints. what conclusion anyone draws is up to him / her, but i do believe having comprehensive info is helpful to that end. (Edit) PS. To avoid the useless drivel some of the previous posts about Cornell descended into, I'm happy to have anyone interested in Cornell's Econ PhD program PM me, whatever your field. If its not something I work on, I'd be happy to direct you to current students who do work in that area and can help with your queries.

yeah, exactly the response I anticipated. what happened? no more factoids about the program to share? Note I pointed out that it was a nitpick, which is the best one can say for all your 'facts' about Cornell's Econ PhD so far, the majority of them being just plain false. It may be a flaw for you, nothing in the post suggests it is one to me. I know what Ted's role in advising Cornell econ PhDs is unlike you (some of this can gleaned from looking at the Cornell Econ Alumni list, which also lists committees for each student). That he has not chaired a committee yet, does not worry me or strike me as a flaw. He was gone for year within a couple of years of getting tenure. He has just returned, if he doesn't chair a commitee in the next 5 years, that would be a concern. At least I can see more than one side of any statement, which is not true for any of your posts so far.