kipfilet

I would say OSU. It is a solid school for macro, and is very good for finance. It is also much easier to move to Europe and/or Industry in the US having a PhD from a US university.

I went to grad school in a different part of the East Coast where local taxes are known to be extremely high. I went to the website you gave me and with a normal grad student income it does generate an effective tax rate of about 20% when FICA is subtracted

1) This will depend on state and city tax. My stipend fluctuated between 27-40, depending on RA work etc, and I typically paid an average (total = federal + local) tax rate of about 25%. This is probably an upper bound as I went to school in blue state in the Northeast (so the rate will be lower if you go to grad school in say Texas, where there is no state income tax). 2) I got paid a 9 month stipend, and the three summer months (June, July, August) were holiday. This obviously depends on your visa arrangement. I was on a F-1 visa, meaning that I could work for as many hour as I wanted during these months, provided that I was working for the university sponsoring my visa (i.e. summer teaching, RAing for my advisor, etc.). If you are on a F1 visa and you want to work outside (say do an internship at a Fed), you need university permission and apply for a pre-completion OPT which can take over 3 months to process.

OSU ~ UVA > Davis > rest

Some things to bear in mind: (i) Look at assistant professors at good LACs and where they got their PhD's from. I doubt you'll find many people with PhD's outside the top50. I went to the US News LAC ranking and randomly picked two top30 LAC's, to see where their recent hires are form (older professors do not count as the market was very different back then). Macalaster College only seems to have one AP, with a PhD from Minnesota. Oberlin's APs have PhDs from Columbia, Vanderbilt and UPitt. Even if you go down the rankings, you still find plenty of recent hires who have graduated from top20 schools. (ii) Good industry jobs are more pedigree-obsessed than academia. This is especially true in finance (hedge funds, global banks, etc.). Goldman Sachs and AQR, for example, do not hire outside of the top10. It is true that there are some non-elite industry jobs that still require a PhD (i.e. transfer pricing), but many of the industry placements could be attained straight from undergrad (entering at a lower level, of course). Examples are major strategic consulting such as McKinsey and BCG. (iii) Demand for policy jobs is likely to decline in the next few years due to the current political climate. The current administration has already stated that they tend to defund many federal agencies that are active in the PhD job market, heavily affecting those that do macro, labor, health, IO, etc. Also, the Fed System will cut substantially on hiring as they return to pre-crisis mode (the Board has publicly stated it had reached steady state after two years of hiring around 40 people a year). Furthermore, Dodd-Frank reform is likely to eliminate some agencies/responsibilities from other agencies and the Fed, further reducing the demand for PhD economists. All of this to say that as the policy market becomes thinner, it is likely that it becomes exclusively accessible to people from top departments (this is already more or less the case with the Feds and the IMF: the Board and the good regional banks only hire people from the top20 basically). (iv) many places only report their best placements on their website. Even some top places do this (Harvard is known for that), but this becomes more pervasive as you go down the rank. So the placements you have looked at might only be the upper quartile of the distribution. One good sign that this is happening is when a school lists 8-10 job market candidates in a given year, but then only report 2-3 placements per year. I just to the most recent US News ranking and picked two borderline top50 places randomly. First exhibit: Southern Methodist University has 9 candidates on the market this year, but only report 3 placements for 2015, 1 for 2014, 5 for 2013, etc. The second place I had picked was the University of Florida, but they neither report their JMCs not their placements on the website (or at least I couldn't find a link after 10 seconds -- huge red flag for me). (v) Your conclusions sound pretty accurate for top50 departments, but I would doubt that the median dept ranked lower than 50 has such a positive outlook (see point above).

My 2 cents -- looking at a weighted average of placements in the last decade, the hierarchy would be something like MIT ~ Harvard ~ Stanford > Princeton ~ Berkeley > Chicago ~ Yale ~ Northwestern ~ NYU > Columbia ~ UPenn These 11 schools form a more consensual top10 these days. Once you move to the top20 there's much more room for discussion, as trends are much more noticeable (i.e. Minnesota and UCLA in decline, Duke and UCSD rising, etc.) Also, I generally agree with the controversial statement: unless you are doing it for love/fun, it's not really a great investment of your time (and life) to go for a PhD outside of the top50. Bear in mind that your chances at an academic placement will be extremely low, and even the 3rd quartile-student will end up in industry. If you are risk neutral, the median placement is a good ex-ante indicator of where you will end ; if you are risk averse, look at the below median placement. If you look at placements for places that are almost in the top50, you can easily confirm what I said. Even policy institutions tend to only hire graduates from top20 programs (think IMF, Fed Board and the good regional Feds). thus the original advice applies perfectly -- unless you have very specific personal reasons to go for it, you are better off heading to industry straight away.

Take grad econ classes at the top university close to your location. I assume you are working at a CB in Latin America, which is probably in the country's capital and hence close to a top national university with a PhD program modeled after the US standard. Take Micro and Macro, get good grades and this should absolve you of your past grades. I think that this is the main problem in your profile right now - I have never met an international student who has been accepted to a top US PhD without having done any graduate economics courses (there are some exceptions, but these are truly exceptional people). Ask the professors there for recommendations. Complement them with recommendations from top research people at the CB where you work. Recommendations from math professors who never published in economics will not be given much weight, especially at higher ranked programs.

In my experience, and judging from the small number of people who have failed Quals and left the program while I was around, most of them would roughly fit in category 2. I definitely don't think that either 1 or 3 are the case. I think that category 2 is too simplistic a label, though: most of them were clear casting mistakes, people who did not know very well what they were signing up for when they enrolled, and were not expecting the workload in first year/what doing research entails/lacked the work ethic to succeed in a quantitative graduate program. Most of them end up at very desirable non-academic jobs anyway.

I'm a graduate student in NYC and living costs are ok. Granted, I don't save much, but it doesn't make much sense to be saving as a grad student as per the PIH. The many distractions from my studies are probably a more binding constraint than money :) I do think it's easier for people from my and other NYC-based schools to access some private sector jobs (especially related to banking and consulting). That is due to the brand name and proximity of the universities' business schools to Wall Street. A nontrivial number of people in my school do summer internships etc at banks/financial institutions. I think we do have an advantage if you want to move to the financial industry after the PhD.

I think Kaysa meant that they seem too high. My impression is that there is very high variance. This means that: 1) If that's a single observation, it's not very informative; 2) If those are averages, they are driven by a fat upper tail. The latter concern is particular true if business schools are taken into account, as they tend to pay considerably higher salaries. I would say, however, that the median schools pay lower salaries than that.

Given the purposes and objectives of this forum (to provide realistic advice to the less informed), I would urge the competent authorities to do something about this sort of comments, which are intentionally misleading and confusing for the people who come here to seek that sort of advice. The OP appears to be sensible enough to dismiss these ridiculous statements, but the same may not be true for other people who read this.

In the US: top50 us news econ department. Outside the US: top school in your country

Depends on the school. Some schools (Chicago, NYU, Harvard, Stanford) have very close ties with the respective business schools and the econ and finance departments tend to be relatively involved with each other, so it's easy to be in Finance doing non-Finance econ stuff and vice-verse (be in Econ doing very financey stuff). This is not the case in other schools, so I would suggest you contacting current graduate students to see what they think.

I know a lot of people at top PhDs who spent a couple of years at the NY Fed.

Very good advice, especially for foreigners.