to2012

That is an especially harsh grade distribution for a PhD course, and it's unlikely that adcoms at other universities are (broadly) aware of it.

Let me make this simple for you. Outside of idiosyncratic personal reasons to attend UCI in particular, you should go to UCSD if you face this choice. And at the risk of being blunt: if your personal reasons for being in Irvine rather than San Diego are so strong that you're willing to disadvantage yourself professionally to a great extent by attending UCI --- despite the fact that the two schools are not even especially far apart geographically --- then you should probably reconsider whether or not academia is for you. The fact that you even have to ask suggests to me that you need to do more research about the realities of economics academia. I have been on both sides of the academic market. Repeatedly. Here's what I've learned. Pedigree matters. A lot. It affects: the quality of training you get; the quality of your peers; the availability of networking opportunities with potential editors, referees, and collaborators; whether or not you have access to input from advisors who know what's going to publish in top journals in your field six months from now (maybe because they have a direct influence over this); and how likely it is that your application gets taken seriously by employer X when you are on the job market (this happens in all employment sectors, not just academia). In a hypothetical where you took two candidates with identical portfolios from these two schools, I'd bet that the UCSD candidate would do better if not much better on the job market. Moreover, economists won't even apologize for this. Instead, they'll argue that reading 800 job market papers (many of which they'll emphasize are badly written) is impossibly time consuming and consequently that low-cost filtering on observable signals (i.e. where you went to graduate school) is completely legitimate. They'll also argue that the well-connected scholar is more likely to publish, develop a valuable network, "look good" to outsiders, and so on. And we haven't even begun to address the fact that if you cloned a prospective graduate student and sent one clone to UCI and the other to UCSD, their portfolios probably aren't going to be identical at the end of graduate school. The only point that works in favor of attending a lower ranked school is that in some situations, it might be easier for an exceptional student to attract attention (and glowing letters of recommendation) from faculty at a low ranked program. While I think that there might be elements of truth to this, I'd also wager that (1) this is idiosyncratic to the program if not the advisor and (2) the balance still weighs heavily in favor of attending the better school. Furthermore, planning on being an exceptional student is a bit of a fool's errands for most applicants.

I agree with everything OP posted. If your life goal is to work in the economics department at MIT, I hope you did your undergrad at an elite university. On the other hand, let me indulge for a moment by presenting a caveat in the form of a personal anecdote. I am a very unprestigious person. I have three degrees, each from a second- or third- tier public university. Nevertheless, I received multiple offers from high-paying academic jobs with light teaching loads. Ultimately, I ended up at a well-known university in a major city. This despite the fact that I work in a subfield of economics that is especially top-heavy with regards to institutional affiliation. There are a lot of great academic jobs that are open to people from average graduate programs. Even if you work in a tough field like econometrics, theory, macro, IO, etc. You probably won't end up at MIT economics (I'm certainly not in a department that's in the same stratosphere), but you might end up at a university that your layperson family members have heard of. Maybe even with a $120K salary and a 2-1 teaching load. And that's good a pretty damn good job.

IMO, if OP wants to get into a top 50 program then they should enroll in graduate micro at a top 50 program and get an 'A' before applying. They should also endeavor to get legitimate research experience and have a letter writer who can attest to their strengths as a researcher. Personal anecdote time, only because I think that it's relevant for OP: I had bad undergraduate grades. After undergrad, I got serious. I went back to school and got more-or-less straight 'A' grades in: i) an economics masters ii) the relevant part of an undergraduate degree in math iii) the relevant part of the first two years of a doctoral degree in math. I also performed very well on the GRE. Guess what? I had to apply twice to gain entry to a top 50 phd program. Of course, this is N=1, and who knows what my letters of recommendation said coming out of my masters. However, to me it looks like OP needs a lot of work before they can reliably get into the top 50. I don't think that it's insurmountable, but it would really help their cause to both get an 'A' in graduate micro at a respectable place like Notre Dame and get some research experience. Best of luck, OP.

Arizona is a very good place to do environmental economics as a graduate student right now. This is especially true if you are interested in the application of structural econometrics and/or computational methods to applied topics within environmental economics.

I disagree with your interpretation that my comment serves to belittle anyone. The point I am making is that you might observe a negative correlation between performance in the first year and job market outcomes because students who specialize in micro theory tend to do well on coursework and they also tend to not get good jobs. Whether or not that correlation holds is independent of the hypothetical performance of theory students under counterfactual field choices. I think that you probably understand this point, and are inferring statements that I haven't actually made. With that being said, I don't really think that this thread is well-served by us continuing this back-and-forth.

I didn't post in this thread to initiate the 10,000th iteration of the "which is more valuable --- theory or empirical?" debate (a topic that I don't personally find to be especially interesting or productive). Nevertheless, evidently my words have offended some posters here, and for that I apologize. It wasn't intentional, sincerely. My point is simply that the reason why there might be a weak or even negative correlation between performance in coursework and performance in research can probably be explained (at least in part) by choices in field. Secondly --- and perhaps more importantly for the purposes of this forum --- it is indeed a fact that micro theory does not place well. Whether or not that's an efficient (by whatever definition of that term you want to use) market outcome is really beside the point, as far as prospective graduate students are concerned. What is important in my opinion is for people making lifelong career decisions to be informed about what kind of unconditional outcomes they can expect when they complete their graduate work. There is a huge gap between the economics that many people learn in preparing to enter a graduate program and the economics that most readily leads to a successful academic career. This isn't even just a theory vs empirical thing. Even within reduced form applied micro there is a relatively narrow class of questions that are safe for graduate students to pursue, because the profession as a whole insists on "identification" that can only be achieved in certain contexts. I think probably at the top of the profession students and young researchers have more latitude with respect to some of this stuff. But for the rank-and-file folks (such as myself), it's tough sledding.

Keep shouting into the echo chamber.

There is a negative correlation between performance in coursework/exams and academic placement because theory students do well in coursework/exams and theory students don't place well. There are seriously talented theorists every year who wash out of academia because they can't get a decent job. The economics profession is becoming more and more oriented towards applied researchers whose research agenda consists of applying canned linear regression routines to various data sets. If this doesn't sound appealing to you, my advice to you is to find something else to do with your time. If this does sound appealing to you, great! Forge ahead. Here's a secret: even though economists are enthralled with the idea that what we do is especially rigorous and difficult, economics prelims aren't really all that tough. The majority of students at the majority of programs pass their first-year exams, even though most of them go on to do work that isn't especially analytically demanding.

Penn State has a great program for theory, econometrics, trade, and probably some other fields. They punch above their weight in those areas. No funding is tough but I'm sure it's only for one year. If you have a tuition waiver and only need to cover living expenses for a year I'd definitely go to Penn State if you think you are good and would like to research in one of the aforementioned fields (provided that you prefer US to europe).

At my middle-of-the-road PHD granting institution, there was no measure theory in the first year sequence. I suspect that this might be true at many universities. I don't think that most economists know (or have known) measure theory.

For most students, single variable, multiviariable, linear algebra, and real 1 will suffice. I'm on the fence about "calculus-based probability" and real 2. If you feel that you must do micro theory, take those courses, and also measure theoretic probability and stochastic processes too. If you feel that you must do econometric theory, I guess I'd take them all, except for ODE/linear algebra. I guess I'd emphasize that if you belong to the category of "I must do micro theory in graduate school" or "I must do econometric theory in graduate school", then I'd cut the fat out of those lists and prioritize taking measure theory with the first year (pure) math PHD students at your university.

My personal impression is that the modal school doesn't give failing grades in graduate courses except in very extreme circumstances. A good portion of faculty simply give only 'A' and 'B' grades as a rule, and I've never heard of anyone getting below a 'C' in a graduate course. I can't contemplate what it would have taken to get an 'F' grade in any of the graduate courses I've taken. I've taken grad math courses where the math students told me that the teacher assigns 'A' grades carte blanche. The problem for OP will be that at least some adcoms will share this impression, whether or not it is fair for OP. Even if OP has high or very high ability -- which he knows more about than we do -- he is facing a terrible uphill battle to get admitted to even a top 50 ph.d. program. Good luck OP, but I think you should be prepared to do something other than academic work for a career.

IMO (2) is much more useful (and necessary) for research-level theory than (1).

Have you decided before graduate school that it is absolutely essential for you to study micro theory or econometric theory, despite the thankless nature of these fields and the poor job prospects for even strong students? Then take measure theory and a basic course in functional analysis or convex analysis. Are you literally anyone else? Don't take any more math.

I do not entirely agree with this post. Having to do 2 TA assignments each term during first year and job market year is a burden. I believe that, for example, USC offers all of their students first and last year fellowships. I'm not aware of other schools in this range that do this.

Schools in the 30-50 range are much more likely to be looking at students with flawed or average profiles than schools at the top tier. These students are more likely to boost their profile with a masters degree than with a selective RA with a top professor or JPAL, etc, which they probably don't even know about, and wouldn't be selected for even if they applied. I'd guess that the % of students with masters degrees peaks around the 30-40 schools and declines from there, for domestic students at least. I'd expect international students to have advanced degrees pretty universally.

Something to keep in mind that hasn't been discussed here in great length is that private schools in the tier of Princeton tend to have considerably more financial resources available to them than public schools. This matters for grad student QOL: stipends, quantity of TA work needed from grad students, resources for travel to conferences and other research-related expenditures, etc.

With some recent faculty moves (Chassang to econ, Sannikov to Stern), NYU is arguably a top 3-5 theory school in the world. You should go there. It is better than caltech for theory unless you are interested in some niche topics, IMO. Caltech is excellent as well, don't get me wrong, and I'm not super familiar with their department, but there is a very short list of schools that are better than NYU in theory at this exact moment.

I agree with everything that's written above, but I thought that I'd chime in to share a personal anecdote (with all the usual caveats about n=1, etc.) pertaining to how lowering your sights might give you significant hope for better results. I applied a few years ago with a flawed but unusual profile and mostly hit the top 20. I got shut out, save for an unfunded admit to a top 40 school that I didn't accept, and one lower-teir place with marginal funding. I re-applied next year with a few more courses under my belt (I doubt that this mattered), rewritten letters from all of the same people, and aimed for schools ranked between 30 and 40. I was admitted to about 8 or 10 schools in this range (almost every one), generally with full funding. I really do not think that my application package was significantly improved from the previous year. The largest addition was a few As in graduate math courses. That might have helped, but I think the much more important factor was that I aimed a tier lower.

If you can get LORs from people who do research I don't see why your profile isn't good enough for a top 40.

Just to throw in an additional POV, I know that at least some programs, grad students are relied on heavily to perform TA work. I am aware of instances of students requesting to sit out of TA work for a period of time (without pay, of course) and being told no. This is probably less of a thing at better places, though.

Age isn't going to be a problem for you IMO. There are people (much) older than 40 in Ph.D. programs. I could see you getting into perhaps much better schools for finance than for econ, btw.

You have little chance at top 30 (sorry)but will do well in schools ranked between 30 and 50. Your profile somewhat resembles mine, except that I did an MA in econ instead of finance and I had more math. You can find it on the board somewhere, along with my results.

As above, if standard 40 hour per week job that isn't unusually stressful or demanding, you should be able to do it. Econ grad school is more work than 40 hour per week job plus one course, IMO.