TheTemp

Agree with tm_member. I'd long considered an econ PhD but ultimately I chose a health policy PhD program (wrapping up my first year now). I made that decision because: I was 100% certain I wanted to do health policy research, I felt I needed to learn more about the institutions, and I knew I wanted to be more of a consumer than a producer of pure econ research. I think the only similarities between econ and health policy PhD programs is that there can be significant overlap in the training. Most health policy programs require econ-focused students to take micro, econometrics, and a handful of field courses in the econ department. Otherwise, I think there are many differences. For one, you will likely have a number of courses devoted to understanding the structure of and institutions involved in healthcare payment and delivery. Second, your cohort may consist of many non-econ-focused students, which may make for a different environment. Related and broadly speaking, the field of health policy/health services research is very interdisciplinary so it's not uncommon to work with non economists and to have those folks on your dissertation committee. Third, you'll ultimately be acculturated to a different professional community (though of course there is some overlap). For example, you may or may not go to the AEA conference in January, but may instead find your job by attending the AcademyHealth research meeting or ASHEcon. Some coming from a health policy PhD may consider themselves a health economists, but others will consider themselves a health services researcher. Fourth, there will be pressure to publish during your PhD. Most health policy PhDs on the job market will have at least a handful of pubs and that is certainly expected, while that is typically not the case for econ PhDs. Related, your target journals may not include any of the top econ journals or even JHE, but instead may include Health Services Research, Health Affairs, or even one of the JAMAs. You will likely never publish a solo-authored research article. Finally, I don't know that the admissions are more lenient per se, but they are different. These are typically small programs who admit a handful of students in a given year, and that translates to an admissions rate of roughly 5-12%. The expectation is not necessarily that you'll have advanced math coursework (e.g. real analysis), but many applicants do so you may be at a disadvantage if you do not. The GRE expectations at the top health policy programs will be roughly the same. Basically, many applicants look like econ PhD applicants, except health policy PhD programs rarely take folks straight from undergrad. So they tend to have a similar transcript to those applying for econ PhDs, plus they have at least a few years of work experience and/or a masters degree. And work experience is tremendously important for admissions. Check out profiles of the students at Harvard and Penn, for example. If you have any additional questions, feel free to shoot me a PM.

You may want to consider UNC's or Duke's public policy PhD programs. Both strong programs that will value your professional experience, and you may find better research fit there rather than an econ program.

Lots of good advice so far. I'll add another, less-commonly mentioned option for the more applied-micro minded folks: RA'ing at RAND or another similar institution (e.g. Brookings). I worked at RAND and really enjoyed my time there. I was able to work on a mix of contract- and grant-funded work and was involved in basically every phase of the research process (other than leading as PI of course). As a result of my work there, I was able to co-author on 9 journal pubs (1 first author), 8 RAND reports, have 2 more journal pubs under review now (1 first author), and 3 more soon-to-be-submitted. All that to say that it was a productive time for me and there is plenty of opportunity for co-authorship. In addition to all of that and building my programming and econometrics chops, I learned about things like project and client management, how to juggle many different projects and responsibilities at the same time, and how to write for different audiences. The nice thing about working at a place like RAND is that there is very likely somebody in one of the offices with similar research interests, and likely somebody with deep methodological expertise that you can learn from (including non-economists). Plus there's an opportunity to work on pretty high-profile stuff that may directly influence policy. I ended up in a health policy PhD program because I realized my research interests and training needs better aligned with these types of programs, but lots of former RA's have gone on to top econ and public policy PhD programs. Like I said, I really enjoyed my time there -- I learned a ton in general and about myself in particular (i.e. that I wanted to focus on health policy and health economics, and that I really enjoyed working on both grants and contracts). Feel free to PM if you have any questions or want to hear more.

I work at a think tank, so feel free to PM me if you have any questions about that path after undergrad. I think working at one of the larger think tanks could be beneficial by giving you broad exposure to different research areas while interacting with researchers from various disciplines. Happy to share my experience.

Ah didn't realize you were only a sophomore. That's what I get for skimming. You're probably better off taking upper level math instead of programming courses per se, but if you get an opportunity to do some stata work for your econ prof then that could be valuable. Nice to see you've used R - I prefer it personally but many (most?) economists seem to rely on Stata.

For university-based RA postings, be sure to check here: Research Assistant Positions not at the NBER . I'd also recommend looking into think tank RA jobs (e.g. RAND, Brookings). Do you have programming skills? That would be very helpful when applying for these types of positions.

Curious to hear more about your opinion on this. Care to do a bit more derailing? :)

If you're interested in a research assistantship at a think tank, feel free to shoot me a private message and I'd be happy to answer any questions. I've been here for about 10 months and I really enjoy it, especially after spending about 1.5 years in industry in a research position. To me the main advantage of working as a research assistant after undergrad is learning what professional "research" actually is and whether or not you enjoy it. If you do enjoy it, it's a fantastic opportunity to begin building your interests in a particular research area before heading back to school. There are of course plenty of other advantages such as getting your name on publications, various networking opportunities, getting paid, and building research skills (like working on your STATA chops, becoming increasingly comfortable synthesizing a huge amount of literature in a short period of time, etc). To the extent that it matters to you and your career outlook, one potential drawback is that you'll be getting a later start to your post-grad school career. But for the reasons I mentioned, I think (hope) it's worth it for me and I'm really enjoying the work I do.

Just came across this NBER paper on several programming languages - may be of interest to the OP or others: A Comparison of Programming Languages in Economics EDIT: just realized somebody had previously linked to this paper so I guess I'm late to the party!

Though he isn't in an econ department, Amitabh Chandra is a very productive researcher currently at Harvard Kennedy School who received his Economics PhD (and BA) from University of Kentucky. I think he was previously in the econ department at Dartmouth.

Perhaps not as mathematical as you'd like, but I've found Angrist & Pischke's Mostly Harmless Econometric and Kennedy's A Guide to Econometrics quite useful for intuition and explanations.

Interesting. Could you describe this a bit more? Maybe through PM if you prefer. Very interested to hear about your decision process.

So how did everyone do?

If by "climb the ladder" you mean end up as a "researcher" or PI then I agree. There are other ways to move up in some of the organizations you've mentioned which do not require a PhD. OP- I work for a think tank currently and a have a fairly good feel for some of the types of positions one can get with a masters. Feel free to PM me for some additional info.

Some time ago I randomly came across this list of book recommendations from the Carnegie Mellon faculty and return to it every so often. It covers a wide range of material from true "classics" to some more contemporary overviews.