walt526

Erin and asquare, Thanks for all the hard work it takes to run these forums. It has been a tremendous asset to me and countless others for our graduate application process. We have a difference of opinion (not the first time that an issue like this has come up), but I respect that it's your prerogative to establish whatever policies you feel best serve the greater community and/or make it easier to manage. But if I can't have what I (and many other posters) feel are on-topic discussions in our regular forums than there simply isn't much for me here. Given that the nature of this particular topic revolved around expectations of the housing market (current topics in economics are regularly discussed) as well as a topic of interest to many posters who frequent it, I respectfully continue to disagree about whether its germane or not. But regardless, it's your house and we're all just guests, so it's incumbent upon us to either accept the policies or find some other internet board to frequent. At this time, I am choosing the latter (and not simply because of this little disagreement; whether to continue frequenting TM now that my admissions process is complete has been something that I've been debating for a while now). But again, I am very grateful to the entire TM community for the help over the past few years (especially the last 10 months or so). I eventually scored an 800Q on the GRE, got into a school that I think will be a great fit for me, and even managed to secure a very generous funding package during a very tight financial environment for universities. I'm not sure that all of those things would have happened without TM and so I am very appreciative of all the time and energy that you and asquare put into making this such an awesome resource. Best regards, -Walt

I voted for GFU, but I'd definitely suggest finding out definitively about whether the math courses are taught in German (that's possibly a deal breaker if your German isn't proficient enough to understand instruction in a difficult course).

While that's true of a vast majority of MPP programs, there are a handful that are at least as rigorous as a MA Economics (from a well-respected program). Respectfully, since the OP did not identify where he's headed, I'm not sure that your advice is necessarily well-founded (although in most instances I would tend to agree).

It would be like wanting to buy a Honda Ridgeline rather than a Ford F-150 because Consumer Reports prefers the Civic to the Focus. Honda may be the stronger brand overall, but Ford clearly dominates when it comes to trucks.

Why are you looking at rankings for undergraduate programs rather than graduate rankings (that are specific to the Economics department)?

My mistake. In that event, then definitely UTD. I had no idea that there was even a Middle Tennessee State University. I'm not sure which rankings you're looking at, but for USN&WR Economics rankings has both MTSU and UTD as unranked. In any event, either EconPhD.net or Grijalva and Nowell (2008) do a better job, IMHO. MTSU is unranked in the former and ranked 125th in the latter, while UTD is ranked 214th in the former and unranked in the latter. So neither is especially well-positioned to get you into a top PhD program. Point about being in Dallas being better for finding a job afterward remains (although I'm not sure whether I'd rather suffer in Tennessee and Texas, but that's just me)...

It depends. There isn't a hard and fast rule and it depends on the individuals on the adcom. An academic economist from an unranked school that consistently publishes in a top field journal may be better known to a particular adcom member (if that happens to be his/her area of expertise) than a bigger name (according to IDEAS) in another field. I suspect that the fact that LORs are weighted differently and randomly (if not inaccurately, at least based on an IDEAS ranking or whatever) contributes a lot of the "noise" in the admissions process.

Of the two, UTD probably has the higher profile, particularly if you're interested in behavioral/experimental (but I have no idea how involved MA students are in that research though). FWIW, I think that there is a poster who either a current or former student of MTSU (not sure if undergrad or grad) who has a very favorable opinion of the place. But neither of them are really considered among the top MA programs in the US, particularly if you're looking to advance to a PhD (not saying that to be mean, just offering you a candid assessment of both choices). Based simply on the academics, I think that they're probably equal in terms of rigor and prestige within academia (both are 150-200ish schools), except for the fact the UTD is well-known for experimental stuff. I'd probably choose UTD since you said that you wanted to get a job immediately after (obviously there is a lot more happening in Dallas than Bozeman and geographic proximity is key to landing a job right out of grad school). But in terms of where I'd want to live (and cost of living), MTSU has the edge in that respect (at least IMHO--you couldn't pay me enough money to live in Dallas).

Are you planning on the MA being your terminal degree or setting the stage for admission to a PhD in Economics?

Sounds like you should probably make some other plans for the summer (although there's an outside shot that someone will choose not to attend or they'll locate additional funding). :(

There have been a number of threads that have discussed the utility of this text at length (we may have lost a number of them in the crash, but there were discussions before mid-May 2009 and/or since mid-February 2010).

When I said "massaging the design" I was thinking mostly in terms of choice of your covariates.

I don't have any suggestions for topics, but for a MA thesis I would suggest sticking with some sort of panel analysis simply because it's more likely that you'll be able to get a statistically significant result with far less aggravation. Last fall, I had two econometrics courses, both of which required term projects. I did a probit for one and panels for another (same data set) and the probit gave me 10x the number of headaches (needless to say, I'm focusing on the panels for my thesis). I think that DCM can be deceptively simple: it seems very straightforward what the marginal effect of X is versus Y or in affecting choice A, so how hard can it be? But "massaging" the design of your model to get useful results from the data is much harder than it looks. YMMV.

I haven't taken a PhD-level Economics course, but I did take a PhD seminar in Political Behavior in Spring 2008. It was a very small class (4 grad students and 1 senior, who was starting his PhD in Political Science at UCSD the following fall), so it was a little weird at first. But I was able to keep up, ask some pertinent questions (I think), and did well enough. I didn't ask as many questions as I would if I were taking it for my GPA, but I don't think that anyone resented my presence or anything.

For serious work (PhD or professional academic), you want to find the issue, identify the model, review the literature and then gather the data. For an undergraduate or even MA thesis, I would STRONGLY recommend surveying what data is available before you invest a lot of time in reviewing literature. Partly because you have far less time and partly because students who haven't completed PhD field courses don't have a very good sense of what types of data are easily accessible.