manchild

Try taking a look at this book. I found it very helpful during my undergrad. PROOF IN MATHEMATICS: AN INTRODUCTION

Just wait until the stress of comps! I only got three hours sleep the night before my results came out. Fortunately there was a late night Australian rules football game on the telly to keep my nerves company.

Not very. Some parts of basic vector calc are useful (which it sounds like you might have already covered in your previous courses), such as knowing the difference between partial derivatives, total derivatives and the grad operator. It can also be useful to be able to think intuitively about what different notions of the derivative mean in multiple dimensions, as well as to "visualise" them. But the more advanced stuff like Stokes theorem and Greens theorem are pretty much irrelevant for economics.

Yep, that is what I meant. Although the math does not need to be after the honours degree - for example, in my case, I took a double degree which allowed me to take the maths concurrently with the economics.

Thanks, also great advice in that link. I read it when I was applying, but couldn't remember where to find it now.

There is a lot of good information on this board (and elsewhere) for Australians applying for North American PhD programs. Despite this, I still wasn't really sure what to expect once I started my PhD. Having completed the first year of my PhD, I thought I'd try to fill that gap a bit here. While this will be most relevant for applicants from Australia, others may hopefully find it useful as well. Firstly, a straight honours degree in economics is not going to be adequate preparation for a North American PhD program, as you will be deficient in maths. You will need to take some additional courses from the maths department. Secondly, maths skills atrophy much quicker than you expect. After 2 years off, math camp was a real struggle. The main point of this post is to provide a point of reference for the PhD experience - I'll use the Australian honours year at a Go8 uni. I have heard several people who went through the honours to Australian PhD to lecturer position refer to their honours year as the toughest year of their education. I have also heard people in the North American system refer to the first year of their education as the toughest year. Comparing the two, I would say that the first year of my PhD was tougher and way way more stressful than my honours year. I wouldn't say that the PhD is any more difficult than a rigorous Honours course, but as a whole there is a lot more material to cover in the PhD. In particular, in my case, I had some very good micro courses in my honours year, and they prepared me quite well for my micro PhD sequence. But, I had not taken many (or even any!) rigorous macro or metrics courses and found the PhD sequence quite difficult in these areas. A well taught honours course is good preparation for the PhD, but an easy or poorly taught honours course is just about useless. The Phd program will move much more quickly than what you have been used to: instead of spending a week or 2 on a model, you might be going through as much as 2 models in a week. Keeping up with material as you go therefore becomes much more important - catching up in the last few weeks of the semester is simply no longer possible. Nothing I had done before prepared me for the stress of comps. I never realised how stressful exams could be when there was a legitimate chance that you could fail (fortunately they give you a second chance!). One of the other challenges in the PhD is that you have to wade through a lot of material that doesn't really interest you. Because there is no (at least where I was) chance for specialisation in your first year, a lot of the material will be extremely boring for you, and it certainly takes a lot of discipline to keep on top of it. For me, I have become very grateful that I'm not a theoretical econometrician (and props to anyone that is!). On the other hand, the wide exposure to a lot of different ideas allows you a chance to start really thinking about where you might want to take your research in the future. I think it would be almost impossible to go through the first year of your PhD and not have several ideas about possible future research topics (of course, most of them wont work out for you, but that's another issue). I was at a Canadian university, where almost everyone else had done a masters before entering the PhD. I think the students with the masters were better prepared than I was, but not by enough to justify taking the extra year to do the masters. My advice: if you have a strong first class honours, just bite the bullet and go straight for the PhD, recognising that you might have to work a bit harder than your peers with a masters. I might add some more later if I think of something else, but hopefully that's enough to start some discussion.

Yes, but the methodology is a lot more settled. Most of these disagreements stem from disagreements on underlying assumptions rather than methodological disagreements.

That's a pretty terrible indictment on macro economists. For some reason, it seems to me that microeconomists are much less territorial about there methodologies than macroeconomists. I'm not really sure why, but wouldn't mind hearing people's thoughts on this. Also, if you want to read a critique of a wide range of modern macro (including RBC) try Zombie Economics by John Quiggin. [Disclaimer: I haven't actually read the book myself yet. Quiggin is sometimes referred to as the Australian Krugman to give you an idea of what to expect.]

Yeah, no worries - I totally agree with that. I probably should have included a :) in my post as well.

I wouldn't think call JEEM a second-tier field journal.... it is probably the top environmental journal (although, you might be referring to environmental as a second-tier field!).

After a bit of a closer read, the result isn't really new at all: their basic result is essentially the same as a 1985 working paper by a J. Seade (they are forthright about this in section 3.2 of the paper). The new contributions are the extensions in section 4, showing that the idea is more general than previously thought. Also, GOAL to the Canucks!

I'm not entirely sure that it is a new idea - it just hasn't been formally written up before. Its well known that quantity restrictions can improve welfare in 'commons' situations. Taxes and/or cost rises can, in some sense, act as de facto quantity controls (the best example of this is the equivalence of a carbon tax and cap-and-trade). Also, the fact that aggregate output needs to be locally convex in aggregate effort is a reasonably strong requirement.

That is what I meant, although I probably wasn't entirely clear about it. The value of the higher ranked program includes the higher stream of income. An interesting and related question is: What is the increase in expected salary from attending a top 10 compared to a top 50? What are the non-monetary benefits from attending a top 10 compared to a top 50 (this will be very subjective)?

The opportunity cost of an extra year of schooling is quite large, probably around $60k -$80k in lost earnings [not that I expect you to earn that straight out of undergrad, but assuming you eventually earn a PhD, it takes one year longer if you delay a year now. So we take your first year of expected earnings and discount it by 5 years]. The question you need to ask yourself is whether you would be willing to pay that kind of money to attend a better PhD program, which would be the likely result of having an extra year of undergrad. Yes, rhis is a bit of a simplistic way of looking at it. But I find that even economists sometimes forget to account for opportunity costs, and attempting to place a dollar value forces you to think about it.

No, not Pi! That movie was terrible! No serious mathematician would ever waste their time looking for patterns in the decimal representation of pi. Too far fetched for my liking.