MooMooCow

I may be biased but this seems absolutely false. Berkeley has a much bigger program and once you adjust for this, their placement is a lot worse. Stanford placed half the class into a top 20 this year. But even if this year is an outlier, average placements at Stanford seem to be better over the past 5 years.

HOPE Group Home This is probably the only major department with a history/philosophy of economics group.

A- and B+'s in undergrad econ classes are unacceptable to top 10 grad programs even if they are at good universities. You need a drastic change on your transcript before you have a chance. Also, why would a person who can't even get an A in an undergrad class have a chance of getting an A in a grad class?

I would recommend that you read Acemoglu with a grain of salt. It is an impressive book. However, unless you are well read in political economy, you will not understand how little that book has to do with reality and how much it borrows from other people's work. In many ways, its a formalization of Marx in game theoretic language.

I disagree with SeanNY. Duke undergrad = Penn undergrad for reputation. With the possible exception of Wharton, which is its own brand. I don't think that admissions officers for econ phd programs would weigh the difficulty of undergrad at Duke and Penn differently.

Successful Duke Undergrad Economists: Susan Athey, Phil Haile, Azeem Shaikh and many more. Duke is an up and coming economics department which is getting better every year. Duke gives undergrads a lot of research opportunities in econ. It is very easy to interact with professors especially because most undergrad econ majors are not interested in academic research. Don't know as much about Rice but I'm sure it is a good place as well.

Why would you teach? Most economics is useless and wrong. The only reason to get a degree is to try to change the lamentable state of the field.

Focus on research rather than on taking a lot of classes. If you can publish by the time you apply or if your profs can vouch for your ability to publish you will be fine. Assuming you continue getting all A+/ A / A-'s you should easily get into top 5.

Overall undergrad ranking matters much more. Having better peers for competition makes all of your grades better signals. Few people go to undergrad schools because of the strength of a single department. For example, Dartmouth does not have a good econ department but a student from Dartmouth should have a much better chance to get into a top grad school than a student from BU. Similarly, with liberal arts colleges do not have large research faculties but consistently produce good grad students.

I think median placement matters the most. If you are a star, you will probably be a star anywhere. However, if your are just good, the connections of your advisers matter greatly.

Often statements that economists believe to be positive are actually normative. That is why understanding ethics is important for an economist.

For public and applied theory it seems like Princeton is a clear choice. Penn possibly has a comparative advantage in empirical micro and search. Penn is also known for having a very active and open faculty. I do not know about Princeton's faculty. Princeton's placements seem better both at the top and at the median.

Modern macro is based on the representative agent model. While this masks itself as a micro-based model it actually not a mathematically valid way of aggregating preferences or multi-person interactions. Thus macro can tell us little about any macroeconomics crisis.

glaeser, acemoglu, krueger

Hi, I applied to two programs at the same school and their GRE code is the same. If I requested the GRE scores once for that code will both of them receive it? Thanks