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dreck

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Everything posted by dreck

  1. I'd say take LSE for their stellar faculty, but what do I know :D
  2. Congrats to those of you who finished. Thought I'd throw in a few words now that I'm a few years into the PhD. The information on this forum for the first two years of PhD was great, but it's missing a lot about later years. Here's a few pieces of advice. Find an advisor who will read your writing. If someone's "too busy" to read your writing, they're either not interested in advising you, or they're not a good advisor for you. No matter how famous they are. Whenever you have an idea or some results, start writing right away. Writing is like being in the seminar room with ten copies of yourself in the audience. You'll understand your work so much better if you're always writing. Don't ever start a research project without really wanting to know that answer to your question. If you start a project you're not super excited about at the start, you'll either end up loathing it or you'll abandon it a few months later. Possibly both. People who enjoy the research game enjoy it because they really want to know the answers to the questions they're asking. So that when data aren't making sense or their advisor points out a serious limitation of their model, they keep at it and figure it out for real. You'll never have the motivation to do that if you're not studying something that fascinates you. Even if your personal contributions aren't all that ground-breaking. Never ever ever compare yourself to your peers. Once you get to the third year of the PhD, everyone's on their own road, and their experience is going to look very different from yours. Some will achieve what academics define to be success, others will hate research and get out as soon as possible, and usually they'll go be successful elsewhere. Just do your own thing and try to find something that makes you happy.
  3. Just do the best you can and keep at it. It's hard to get started, but some day you start to get the big picture and papers start to make much more sense. A good paper will tell you up front what it's trying to do. What is the research question. As you read a paper, continually ask how what the authors are saying answers that question. When authors describe their methodology, ask whether you think that the chosen method is going to be informative as to the answer to their question. When they describe data, ask whether the data are really going to answer their question. When you view results, do they actually answer the question the researcher asks? Are there alternative explanations? Just be skeptical as much as possible. Reading this way will make you a better economist, and your brain will process what you're reading on a deeper level just from your trying to be skeptical. Then when you finish the paper, all you remember is the bare bones of it, and whether you believed the paper's results. Maybe, if you really got into it, some details about why the paper seemed especially good or bad to you. Maybe save that information by writing it down if you think you'll want it later. I don't agree that reading reviews is a good way to read the Piketty book, btw. The reason the book is popular is the overwhelming amount of data, and the data aren't displayed, except for a couple graphs, in the reviews. Even if you don't process every sentence of the book it's worth going through it if you want to really understand it.
  4. Michigan would not be my first choice for behavioral economics (I am a student at Michigan). There are several people in the Econ Department who dabble in the intersection of behavioral economics and their primary field. Joel Slemrod (tax), Miles Kimball (macro, surveys), Matthew Shapiro (macro), anyone working on the CogEcon survey at the Institute for Social Research. There's also Yusufcan Masatlioglu, who does decision theory. And the people you mention outside the Econ Dept. Tyler Shumway is another guy at Ross who dabbles in behavioral, esp behavioral finance. But to be honest, I think that the dominant trend in behavioral economics has been toward moving into established fields. Which makes sense, because a lot of the ideas in behavioral economics have to do with the foundation of microeconomics, and all applied fields draw on those foundations. All this is to say that any large top 20 department is likely to have several people dabbling in behavioral/experimental work. But there are probably more explicitly behavioral people at departments that are not Michigan. Berkeley, Cornell, Caltech, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Chicago, Princeton all seem good off the top of my head. But behavioral comes in many flavors.
  5. I agree with this statement. Asquare mentioned being female forever ago on the forums. I've heard rumors about who she is, but I'm not sure and would never post it.
  6. It contains a fantastic set of articles on income inequality and the Euro, representing a diverse set of opinions. I just finished it. If I teach a class on income inequality in the future I would want to use the first two articles as a starting point. Take a break from worrying about your GRE score and learn about two of the most important issues in modern economics! AEAweb: Journal of Economic Perspectives Vol. 27 No.3
  7. Nope. You're wrong by a gender and then some. I liked the article though. It would be a good thing to refer new members to in the future. Obviously there's a lot of advice out there and it doesn't all square...but that's good practice for when you're doing research.
  8. I respect your opinion, but you are wrong. If you're drunk at 8ball go to fleetwood. I have tried and tried to like Tio's, but no, it's disgusting food. Eonra: I'm sorry I missed you. I'm not in the habit of coming to these forums frequently any more.
  9. Too bad I just saw this, could have introduced you to some grad students. Go to Sava's if you're still in town, it's good and only a little bit expensive Edit: Also don't go to Tio's it's ****ing terrible despite having been on Man vs. Food.
  10. Here's a very recent paper on knowledge spillovers and growth: Can't We All Be More Like Scandinavians? Asymmetric Growth and Institutions in an Interdependent World by Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson, Thierry Verdier :: SSRN So decidedly not a settled area. Actually, we know very little about these things. Still, no one expects you to be an expert on cutting-edge research, because if you were you wouldn't need to get a PhD in the first place. You can read a bunch of papers, but I'm not sure how useful that will be without the training to understand them that you would get in a PhD. So I'd say just talk about what interests you and why, and don't worry too much about relating that to cutting-edge stuff. If you talk too much about current research, you're virtually assured to come across as ignorant. So frame your statement around what you want to learn, not what you know or your opinions of current work.
  11. I just love Noah Smith. Maybe someday I'll tell him how much I love him. I think maybe he already knows. Writing a diary to share with others who are curious about the first year is a good idea, but you should have a very strong "Your results may vary" disclaimer. Also, asquare wrote a post a while back on the first year that I really liked...but I've gotta get back to work, maybe someone else can send you a link. Welcome to Michigan. I hope everyone's been nice to you so far.
  12. Wow, no love for public economics? There's a lot of really awesome research going on there right now. I've picked up a few weird favorites in the past couple years. Here's a list of what comes to mind right now: Taxation as Social Insurance, by Hal Varian is an awesome early optimal tax paper that often gets overshadowed by the Diamond/Mirrlees-type stuff. Teaching the Tax Code, by Raj Chetty and Emmanuel Saez is one of the better field experiments I've seen, and raises a lot of interesting questions about information. Actually, I've become a pretty big fan of Emmanuel Saez lately. His stuff on inequality, bunching, and salience/information are all related to research I want to do someday. As far as a body of work, I've found the optimal tax literature to be way more interesting than it sounds, and I really like normative behavioral economics, despite how hard it is to actually answer the important questions. Chetty, Looney and Kroft is another cool paper about that stuff. And Agarwal et al's paper on The Age of Reason. Another awesome paper unrelated to my own work is "Did Improvements in Household Technology Cause the Baby Boom? Evidence from Electrification, Appliance Diffusion, and the Amish", by Martha Bailey and William Collins.
  13. For a first year course in game theory basic optimization and probability should be enough. You might need to pick up some hardcore analysis on the fly if you really want to understand the existence proofs but most of the focus of the course will be on finding equilibria, which relies on optimization, some probability, and understanding the equilibrium concepts to begin with.
  14. Yup. That's pretty much exactly how I feel too. I'm actually more busy my second year than last year.
  15. Also watch out for the fact that schools with low attrition due to prelims might have high attrition due to people just never finishing even after they pass the prelims. That's something that doesn't get as much attention but it happens.
  16. Quasiconcave: The upper contour set is convex. f(linear combination)>=min(either of the guys). Quasiconvex: The lower contour set is convex. f(linear combination) Those are the only definitions I know.
  17. I guess we've been being too nice. OP, my advice is follow your dreams (trying to keep us on topic).
  18. I have a hard time seeing where you disagree with the OP's point, which was take topology if you can. It sounds like you found it easy because you had taken topology, and he found it hard because he hadn't. It's a sentiment I agree with. Topology works miracles for your proof-writing even if you rarely use the actual ideas.
  19. Here there's kind of an unofficial rule that micro and macro are graded on a less stringent curve because they only really care if you learn the material in time to pass the prelims. So pretty much everyone got a passing grade in the courses--I don't know of anyone who didn't. In econometrics four people of a class of about 40 failed the first semester, but not all of them were Econ PhD's. No idea how many failed the second semester but I bet it was fewer than four. So depending on how prelims work where you are it might very well be true that you don't have to worry about getting a passing grade on the coursework. But there are obvious reasons not to use that as an excuse to do the bare minimum to get by.
  20. Technology is over-rated. Except for Dropbox. Dropbox is awesome.
  21. Ok, allow me to offer some advice that's a bit different from the norm. A lot of people recommend study groups, but I found that for me the temptation to free ride in study groups was too great. So I decided not to be a part of a regular study group, and my performance in my courses improved. But I was very concerned that it would hurt me in the long run, because what I was doing wasn't "normal." But it didn't, and I came up with the following general advice for study habits in your first year. Try a lot of things early, figure out what works for you, and stick to that! If your program is like mine you'll get tons and tons of (sometimes conflicting) advice from upper-year students (or students on TM...) on how to deal with the first year, and it's easy to frantically worry about following their advice properly instead of maximizing your own objective function. So try all the things that are suggested early on (big study groups, small ones, talking to people about problem sets after class, different study areas, studying from notes vs textbooks vs papers, etc etc etc) and figure out what works for you. And then stop comparing yourself and your habits to your classmates. In regard to the direct question you asked, I think you should really solve almost every part of a problem before you get the answer and try to understand it. Occasionally you just won't be able to do that, and then if you've asked for a few hints and that hasn't helped, then you can just take the solution and figure it out. But the more you do that, the more risks you take that you'll see a problem on a test that you can't understand without seeing the solution.
  22. >Done with math camp. I don't mean to one-up you, but...I'm done with prelims. Have fun in the first year guys!
  23. Two is not a multiple of five. People like to group things in multiples of five. We could talk about top 2, top 9, and top 17, instead of 5, 10 and 15, and it wouldn't be any more meaningful. Ultimately the game is one of matching rather than optimization wrt ranking.
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