calchas

There are many ways in which Prof List can inspire aspiring economists .. To me, the simplest inspiration is this: He has reached this far in his career with a PhD from a relatively unrecognized school (Univ. of Wyoming) .. I doubt when he was a professor at Central Florida or Arizona, he was looking at the ranking of his institution too much .. he was probably doing the work he loved and tried to maintain the best quality work .. And over time, his work got recognized and he's now mentioned as Nobel-worthy .. A lot of us are , with good reason, focused on rankings and such in the admission process .. it makes sense to get to the highest ranking institution.. But in the end, your career will be defined as a work in progress over lot of years and not by the school you got your PhD from .. and John List is the best case study in that..

Columbia has an entire PhD program under Jeffrey Sachs and Stiglitz in this area .. SIPA: School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia

Congrats Jeeves .. are you the first winner from VA Tech?

Just something for the OP to consider: you mention attrition rates is not an issue. But in your situation, being an international student, if you take a big loan to study here in a program noted for higher than average attrition, then, should you fail comps for some reason (i hope not for your sake), you are left with quite a large debt burden, with no job prospects .. and what are the alternatives for someone on a student visa who didn't get through comps? ... Perhaps you are just super confident in your abilities, but I'd at least give the attrition rates some consideration if I were in your situation ..

I'll try to be a caddy on a professional golf tour .. If I wanted to do something more serious or important, I'll try to get a research job with my undergrad degrees ..

Golden Rule .. thanks for the additional clarification between trade and macro .. in general, for me, I think Intl Trade > Intl Macro but how big the difference, I won't know until I get more exposure ..

I'm curious to get ideas from people attending your Phd seminars or field courses in International Economics, International Trade, Macroeconomics, Monetary economics and International Labor or other related areas on the following topic: I'd assume you folks are discussing the most important historical papers in these fields as well as those papers at the frontier of today's research .. What math background is needed to understand the seminal papers and catch up quickly to this frontier?

I completely disagree with the above... Practice questions are practice questions, period! There's absolutely NOTHING wrong in seeking out past exams from the current teacher .. The only violation would be if such material has been explicitly made confidential by the examiner, in which case both the person sharing the exam and the one asking for it are breaking the law ... But there's no cheating in solving past exams from an instructor for practice and exam preparation! It's the instructor's responsibility to write appropriate exams ..

In my humble opinion, MHO means My Humble Opinion ..

So I tried dabble's free trial today .. I didn't like the fact that you couldn't use multiple tables and link them which I think is critical to maintain cleanliness .. We'd need one table where we just maintain the list of Economists with a primary key ... this table would have LastName, FirstName, Last+First and an ID number .. Another table will just have a list of Academic Institutions .. If we need to add or delete institutions, we'd do it in this table .. Then, we'll have the Main table where for each Economist, we'll have an Advisee (or maybe 2 fields for co-chairs?) and this advisee can only be selected from the Economists table ... from a drop down list.. and other relevant fields -- like year of placement, institution attended, institution placed, etc. Dabble doesn't allow for this last feature .. we don't want people hand-keying the names of economists or instituitions in the main table .. these should be picked from a list ... I'm gonna look later this week for other alternatives...

I was thinking Wiki and Dabble are part of the same solution ... in that we have a common database editable by a core group. The EconSpace page will have a link to this Database tool, just like it has links going to EconPhD.net and other pages .. so, a WikiDabble if you will :p And seriously, if it is ever successful enough to get up to 100,000 entries, then I think we can find the funding necessary to keep the thing going somewhere bigger .. In fact, if we run two separate Databases - one for academic and one for all other, this might extend the life of the free product .. We could start with the academic placements database since that's what most people care about, except YoungEconomist :D

Will something like this work? Dabble DB - Online Database - Commons (Create a Free Database)

I'd suppose Wiki would be much easier, since this information is not THAT hard to verify ... and quite easy to correct! I actually don't like the structure of the Genealogy project .. The hierarchy could be designed much better ..

Susan has him placed at Stanford. Susan Athey's Students

Yes, I'd seen this for some of math professors before .. It's really cool and would be awesome if we had a similar project for Econ!