chisquared

Hey, a dreck sighting. You should listen to this guy; he send to know what he's talking about...

The reason they don't require you to do the coursework in the PhD is that they expect you to have done the coursework before in an MPhil/MRes/MSc course. You're unlikely to get admitted to a European PhD programme if you haven't done at least the core graduate courses.

Nope. You have no guarantee of funding even if you get a distinction in the EME programme. In fact, your results from EME aren't available till around June, but the department will have allocated most, if not all, of its funding to the applicants they made offers to in April. Getting funding is not impossible, but I'd personally be a bit wary of counting on a funded offer for the MRes/PhD programme, even if I was absolutely 100% sure I was going to ace my exams in EME.

Ah, no, it wasn't. They were about two weeks apart. I missed Michigan's fly-out but went to BU's. Visited Michigan on the same trip.

Oh, I think you misunderstood my other posts. I think LSE is a great place, and I don't regret staying here instead of going to Michigan. I just think people may have some expectations about LSE that don't seem entirely accurate to me, so I pointed those out. :) That being said, I really loved my visit to Michigan, and I'm sure I'd have had an amazing time there as well.

I'm not sure if this is just for LSE, but I believe the ESRC waived the UK/EU requirement for economics PhDs. I know of non-UK/EU students with ESRC funding at LSE.

I'm told Michigan is an amazing place for labour and public. I don't have much information about the department at Wisconsin, though, so I can't compare. Mathemagician's post above sounds accurate, though, based on my visit there two years ago. What you might want to do is fly over once and visit both schools then. That would mean you'll have to miss one school's fly-out, unless you decide to stay in the US for an entire month, which I'm guessing isn't an option for you. For whatever it's worth, I was also on the waiting list at Michigan this time two years ago. I couldn't make their fly-out, but I did fly in from London to attend BU's fly-out. I visited Michigan on that trip as well. They were very accommodating; they set up for me to meet with several professors, the faculty member in charge of admissions, and one of their graduate students specialising in the field I indicated interest in. They gave me a funded offer a week later. You may want to do something similar. Also, given that both places seem to be comparable in terms of fit with your interests, you might want to base your decision on other factors. This is where visiting starts to become quite important. It puts you in a better position to evaluate all the other factors that could affect your decision.

The distinction between an EU student and a non-EU international student probably doesn't matter for program outcomes. It does matter for tuition fees, though, and this difference is substantial. What other offers do you have?

Whether he is, in fact, the most influential is debatable. That being said, he is indeed very influential. The thing about Robert Lucas, though, is that, despite having spent five years studying history, he happened to be both sufficiently intelligent and talented to pick up enough sophisticated mathematical tools to co-author a book that is now a standard reference in the discipline. Unfortunately, I doubt very many people are that smart or talented. These are the people (I'd probably count myself in here) who probably ought to be spending more time than he did picking up the math while in university.

Though, if you find the idea of doing a rigorous masters program in economics as repulsive as the idea of eating deer penis, perhaps a PhD isn't for you. :) Unfortunately, I don't know much about the admissions process, so I can only theorise about heterogeneity in notification times. Yours sounds like a plausible theory.

LSE does rolling admissions for the EME, so you should receive a response a about two months after you apply. This also means that the chances of admission is weakly decreasing over time.

Does the statistics programme at Harvard have a history of placing students into economics PhD programmes? I wouldn't imagine they do (statistics PhDs are probably more likely), but I figure you may have a better shot of getting to know economics faculty members by taking econ courses through the masters at Harvard than by doing EME at LSE. One piece of anecdotal evidence (which makes it hardly conclusive, I know): I have a friend who did his undergrad in a random university in France, with no history of sending students into economics PhDs, but went on exchange at Harvard. He took a class taught by Helpman, and randomly asked Helpman if he needed an RA. Helpman says yes, and my friend gets a good letter out of it. He knows it was good because Helpman's secretary said so, and it got him into Chicago. My friend only applied to Chicago and Harvard. That being said, it looks like you got into Duke, so if I were you, I may take the less risky option and go there, assuming they're funding. Edit: Oh, and stay in close touch with Penn. If you want to go there, you want to keep sending them clear signals that you are very likely to accept their offer if they give you one. I was able to convert two schools that had me on their waiting list this way.

I guess I should qualify this by saying that the reason why I think LSE masters programs aren't great at being a stepping stone towards a top PhD program is that other places (like other top masters programs in Europe) seem to be significantly better. A few reasons: 1. Program size This is more a problem with the MSc Economics programme, which has over 100 students, rather than EME. The number of classmates you'll have will just make it very difficult for you to get attention from your professors. Even if you're in the EME programme, which admits about 30 students, you'll still be taking some of your classes with people from the MSc Econ programme, so the size of their programme hurts you as well. 2. Interaction with professors and mentoring I already suggested a problem with this previously. What makes things worse is that many professors are only really primarily interested in their research; that's part of why LSE does well on some rankings that purely measure research output. In fact, I've heard that it's been mentioned to potential faculty hires that one pro of being at LSE, relative to anywhere else, is having to spend less time with students. That's just the culture here. It's unfortunate for the students, but that seems to be how things go. 3. Usefulness for signalling The way things work at LSE is that you get no grades at all until the end of year, which also happens to be when you complete the programme. This means that, if you plan to apply for PhD programmes during your year at LSE, the degree gives you almost zero signalling value. You can't even signal to admissions committee that you are acing grad econ courses, because you will have no grades to speak of. You do take mock exams at the end of the first term in December, but I'm under the impression admissions committees take these less seriously since they essentially have zero impact on your degree. This means that you might have to wait a year after you graduate from LSE before you enter the best PhD programme you can get admitted to. I suppose this won't be a problem for everyone, but it also means you might be better off in another masters programme that will give you grades midway through. It's especially difficult for graduates from the MSc programme to move on to the MRes/PhD programme. In as much as you have a conditional offer to the MRes/PhD programme by virtue of being in the MSc (conditional on your completing it with a distinction), this also means you will not be guaranteed admission until your results are ready in July. Unfortunately, when that time comes, the department will typically have awarded most of their funding to applicants whom they admitted in/before April. So, while it might be relatively trivial for you to gain admission into the MRes/PhD programme (assuming attaining a distinction were trivial -- it's not), actually being able to enter the programme isn't, unless you happen to have a fireplace you fuel using cash and have decided that you don't mind being a little colder for the next few years. All in all, LSE would still be better than most places. That being said, if you can get into LSE, you can probably also get into a place like CEMFI/BGSE/Toulouse/Bocconi, where you will probably have better outcomes in terms of admission into a top PhD programme. If you're not sure about doing a PhD, though, and want to leave it as an option but also want a degree that adds to your employability, LSE might be a good bet.

Or, you know, the author could be leaving it to you to fill in those gaps. Many maths texts do this.

What gave you this impression? I think that the masters programmes at LSE are terrible at placing students into top PhD programmes, including LSE's own. I'm in the MRes/PhD programme at LSE now, and this is how things seem like to me from here.