appl2007

Well, you will be screwed either way but not because of the market itself but significantly more because you have already decreased your job market prospects by going to a low-ranked school like Cornell.

ted o'donoghue is excellent indeed but he is the only senior economist working on behavior economics at the econ department. it is unclear how much the new addition (dan benjamin) will stay at cornell. perhaps even more importantly, cornell's job placements are abysmal. the last two people at cornell who did behavior, one placed in santa clara, the other one went on the market twice and eventually placed in a non-academic position at cornell itself.

macroeconomicus, i agree with you. but my intuition tells me that mediocre PhD programs...like Cornell's, will fare even worse on such a ranking scheme as the one you suggest...i find it hard to believe that the market will not reward someone who actually "can produce published research" the first time...and five years down the road, on average, the research quality will look even more dismal...but be my guest if you can find any study that confirms or refutes that hypotethesis...

:-) agreed. it is not like they (the rankings) come out of thin air.

Some might be tempted to google and find older versions but the newer one has been published two months ago...which is why I provided the full reference...

well...do you really think that "people graduated since 1990, who placed in economics departments" is of much relevance in argument about placement quality? placing in an economics department of a fourth tier college is better than no placement but somehow is hardly what most academics at top institutions would perceive as successful placements....i dunno...

Since I started this argument with another Cornellian regarding the quality of Cornell's PhD placement...this should settle the issue: From Rabah Amir and Malgorzata Knauff' "Ranking Economics Departments Worldwide on the basis of PhD placement" in The Review of Economics and Statistics, February 2008, 90(1): 185–190....just produced...places Cornell outside of the top 30. I am not even going to comment on their methodology or the conclusions...just thought it might be interesting for some of you.

Let me assure you, the comments are not meant to be snide at all...I am a Cornell graduate myself of the same department (although the undergraduate population had different perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of the undergraduate program)...but what's the point of hiding behind sugarcoated statements about the quality of the PhD program? You believe them or choose to ignore them, you get there and are you miserable if they turn out to be true. All that that this back-and-forth should encourage people to do is to examine the information the PhD program provides a bit more and encourage people to ask the right questions about placements, teaching and research. It is tough to be thorough in examining that info here as it ultimately relates to people and their research and due to the concerns about privacy that we've all been alerted about. But offline you can ask such questions and students can be more free to talk about these things.

Claim 6: Students at no other PhD program spend as much time online defending the quality of their program and its placements against incorrect claims by other students from the same school.

Thank you, asquare! You are correct...it is probably better if names are not mentioned. I provided several names in response to being challenged that I don't have my facts together. Econ2006 challenged me by saying that I have incorrect information about the placements and that multiple occurrences simply violate Cornell's own policy and asked me to provide examples. And so I did...

Hi hubrishedge, I am not interested in disparaging Cornell. I am, however, interested in providing details that paint the correct picture about the department to prospective students. If one person claims that a bad placement (such as the one by XX -- edited by asquare) is an isolated event, I think it would be useful for many to know that that such bad placement is not due it being n=1 but is more of a systematic occurence for Cornell's PhD graduates. Econ2006's keeps comparing Cornell to Michigan, Penn, Northwestern. This is honestly laughable. Neither the quality of Cornell's placements nor the quality of research or teaching at Cornell is at all on par with those of the institutions that Econ2006 mentions. So, my intention is not to disparage but to dispell misleading facts about Cornell and enable people to draw their own decisions based on the correct information. Even the latest post is an example of that...about Basu. Yes, Basu is a great name in development, but he works with 1-2 students at most per year (with him becoming the chair this average number will likely decrease) and the placements of these students in the past few years has been particularly bad relative to Cornell's own placements. It is surprising to me, too, but it is an indisputable fact. So, many can look at him and think that they can expect a wonderful academic career but the evidence suggests otherwise. I am not surprised you "kill the messenger when you don't like the message". Of course all the people criticizing my posts are Cornell graduate students right now. I don't care what you think about the posts, but please don't paint an erroneous picture to prospective students about what your program simply is not.

Thank you for the question but I can not entertain your attempts to make this a personal exchange and distract us from the main argument that we started in the other Cornell thread. You are free, however, to respond to the new example that I provided of yet another Cornell PhD student who appears on Cornell's job market more than once (indicative of the quality of the program) .

To follow-up, I couldn't find anyone in the alumni list with a behavior econ chair in the last 5 years. So, she very well might not only be a very good, but also an excellent (by virtue of being the only one). As a bonus of me browsing the alumni list, and to show you yet another example of a person appearing multiple times on the Cornell market, I saw someone else listed twice on the market: GK (can't list the name for privacy reasons but look her up): once in 2005 and once this year.

I would agree with chauchau regarding going to Cornell for development or behavior. I explained my reasoning in another thread. In fact one of the examples of a specific individual (identifying information removed by moderator) is perhaps the best example of a recent behavior econ product of Cornell whose placement is well...not so stellar... For development it is much better but the development economists are primarily (with the exception of 2) at AEM and make sure that your research interests are aligned with theirs when you go there to do development.

the type of work on national security marty feldstein does, too.