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bheld

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Everything posted by bheld

  1. yeah, actex are actually the ones I'm familiar with. If you can get it cheap it's worth it.
  2. Casella and Berger is impossible in two weeks. This sounds a bit crazy but if you can get your hands on study materials for the actuary P exam and run through it before math camp starts it will give you a great foundation for first year. A good exam prep booklet will cover the basics of probability and give you plenty of problems to solve.
  3. The best way to show the nonexistence of nash equilibria is to assume they exist and then show some sort of contradiction, usually that the strategies are not actually best responses. In this case you want to look at the seller's decision to set a price after the buyer has made his investment. Given each of the buyer's strategies what is the seller's best response (selling price)? Now look at these pairs and check to make sure that they are best responses for the buyer given the seller's price. Usually it helps to break these into intervals and go case by case. Remember that the pure strategies consist of all the positive reals, not just the two that will be randomized over.
  4. One more piece of advice would be to engage students as much as possible as the sessions led by TAs are probably the only opportunity for them to interact in a class setting. You're not there to impress them with your econ skills so back off a bit and let them do more on their own. Anybody involved in education for even a short amount of time will end up hearing the axiom that the best way to learn something is to teach it to somebody else, so don't hog the learning. It's perfectly acceptable for them to learn/discuss/explain things together with you sitting in the corner twiddling your thumbs. Just make sure things are heading in the right direction.
  5. I think the worst experiences are due to either a lack of communication skills or a lack of caring on the part of the TA. The latter is obviously easier to rectify than the former. Anyway, TAs are mostly responsible for presenting examples and answering questions. You don't really need extraordinary expository skills. Undergrads are smart enough to understand the difference between a full professor making six figures and a grad student TA and adjust expectations accordingly. Leave the fancy presentations and activities to the professors and just take a positive attitude into the sessions and things should work out fine.
  6. You can't really knock the University of Tokyo either.
  7. get the gov loan, they are infinitely more flexible and easier to deal with than private firms. The variable rate will be higher by the time you start paying on it anyway.
  8. Are the french schools affected by the strikes/protests/whatever? I might go to Barcelona just to avoid that stuff.
  9. It would help if there were some agreement about the actual purpose of grades. Both arguments in this thread are valid depending on whether the goal is to sort or rank students or if the goal is to communicate mastery of a certain subject. I'm partial to the latter and therefore criterion-based assessment. I don't really get the point of grade quotas.
  10. I believe Heilbroner more than this guy. Worldly Philosophers > some online article
  11. Seems to be more of an argument in favor of a particular approach to economic thought than a true historical account.
  12. Well parental involvement is a key indicator of school success. The problem is that there are too many parents that are not involved in some districts. Privatization is not going to fix this. Um yeah, that's like the first thing anybody considers. It's driven school reform for the past fifty years. If that were the root cause we wouldn't be having this discussion now. Counteracting this income disparity within the education system is where "throwing money at the problem" came from.
  13. Public schools are operated and overseen at the local level. If parents and other people living in a low-performing district gave a damn they would have better schools. If they don't care enough already to ensure a quality education, moving to a market-based system would only serve to exacerbate the problem. Now, using taxpayer money, bad parents are able to pick a school based on their own priorities instead of society's. School quality won't matter for most of them, because it doesn't matter for most of them now. What you're going to have are glorified day care centers where kids with bad parents are basically in holding tanks all day long. You're also losing sight of the motivation for public schools to begin with. It's a public service just like roads, defense, whatever. Society as a whole foots the bill because of the positive externalities created from education. It's not just parents that pay, therefore whether they like it or not they are not the only people that have a say in how schools are run. Unfortunately there are larger societal problems at the root of the problem and as much as people removed from the issue love to prescribe their own solutions (Gates Foundation, Cato, NEA, whoever) until the greater issue of inequality is solved even the most well-intentioned plans are doomed.
  14. You're running into the common problem of how to define "good" and "bad" and alluding to opinions that have more to do with demographics than school quality. Also, research on school choice is notoriously bad. Even if you can get over the selection bias hurdle it takes a lot to make a convincing argument. I'm not really following your argument here.
  15. If you know of a way to accurately and reliably determine the quality of a school you need to forget about a PhD and get rich consulting for the federal government and state departments of education. Even if this were possible you would still have to deal with a significant lag to allow for data collection. Ergo, information asymmetry.
  16. This is only the best thing to do when you can't get a higher rate of return with another investment vehicle with similar risk. The problem is that people underprice the risk of the investment they make by paying down their mortgage. It's not something you are 100% guaranteed to get back and certainly riskier than a normal savings account.
  17. It's Saez. John Bates Clark Medal
  18. Yeah, I sort of took the "Captain Obvious" award with that one, didn't I. :p
  19. I think that there is good evidence that buying is not all it's cracked up to be. Of course we can all point to success and horror stories but on the aggregate (we're aspiring economists, right?) I don't see how you can look at home ownership figures and say that it was a good decision for even half of the buyers. It's only worth considering if you have money to invest, because it's an investment and not an alternative to paying rent. For somebody with no savings home ownership is a terrible idea.
  20. The big point is that it's not simply cut and dry between rent being $xxx/mo and a mortgage payment being $xxx/mo. Even when you factor in insurance, taxes, tax benefits, rental income, yadda yadda yadda there's a slew of stuff you can't quantify that is discounted by a lot of people, and all of these things present risk to the homebuyer. Most people buy the "rent is throwing money away" argument and don't think about what happens if they have to move in a year, or what happens if they lose their job, or what happens when something breaks, or what happens when the furnace dies, or what happens when they guy you're renting to doesn't pay, or what happens when the market tanks, etc. Assuming everything will work out and home prices will appreciate at 10% a year might work for a while but eventually a lot of people are going to get hammered. The reason rents seem high compared to mortgages is that landlords have to deal every day with the above and for the most part we don't.
  21. If you're treating this as an investment opportunity that's another thing completely. This whole discussion is centered around the "throwing rent away" argument for purchasing a home and not the merits of real estate investment. I'll address your points in turn anyway though. The point is that you're paying accumulating interest at whatever rate your mortgage was issued at. Paying extra or not paying extra is simply a matter of substitution between mortgage payments and other investments. If you pay extra on your mortgage you are giving up profits on other potential investments. This brings us to mistake #1, which would be assuming that there is no risk involved in making extra payments (the risk comes from the probability that the loan will not be paid off, i.e. you lose your principal). Technically this would be an arbitrage opportunity and I don't really think that it's going to take a graduate student to make the market efficient. If you are moving into a new city and observing a difference between rents and prices, are you the only one seeing this or is there something that the big players that have lived in these cities for years know that you don't? Likewise, the money you're paying in interest is going right down the toilet. The question is if the benefits from renting outweigh the benefits of home ownership. This is no different from renting. Rental costs also decrease dramatically as rooms increase. Nobody is saying that. But now you have to deal with the same pains that come from renting your place out except now you're in another city. This means that now you have to pay somebody to do everything you might have been able to do on your own, plus you've introduced agency problems that didn't exist at the start. Namely, you're not there 24/7 to keep an eye on things and the property manager isn't going to do care as much as you do.
  22. Yes, the fact that housing is necessary does imply that one would either have to rent or own. The point is that thinking of it as discretionary income instead of an unavoidable cost of living is a main cause of irrationality when it comes to the purchase/rent decision. Look at a standard amortization schedule for a 30 year mortgage and see how quickly you're paying down that principal. Now consider the fact that the average length of ownership is about six years. Putting those two together is a pretty good indication that home ownership is a sucker's bet for a large chunk of buyers. Again, I'm sure it works for some people but there are always big winners in Vegas too. The house always wins in the end though.
  23. So the argument is that economists have not been able to influence policy, hence they fail? Has this guy looked around at the general state of politics today? We can apply this line of reasoning just about everywhere. Inaction on global warming? Well, the climatologists must be terribly ineffective. And so on.
  24. I'm not sure I understand his point if there is one. What exactly is he expecting modern economists to do if not mathematical analysis? If he wants non-technical analysis and opinions all it takes is a trip to online message boards or a chat with a stereotypical Austrian. The reason all of the early 20th century economists are cited so much is that the general public is so innumerate that is about all they can handle. Many people can't even grasp basic economic concepts like supply and demand, so who is going to reference economists known for their modeling skills?
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