Vengeance

I'd definitely add Minnesota to your "top-top tier list". They have a lot of impressive people like Chari, T. Kehoe, P. Kehoe, Guvenen, Rios-Rull, etc. Plus Mineapolis Fed at their service. Maybe they don't place as good as the places you mentioned, but it isn't because of the quality of their faculty. And Northwestern has Christiano and Eichenbaum -- two of the biggest names in DSGE modeling.

I'm not in a position to rank all departments, and then determine where BU stands, but I should say from the list you provided, Bob King and Gilchrist stand out. Epstein is a big name -- in micro. Baxter is more international finance, I guess. Overall, BU is a good department (large faculty with diverse interests), but you know, it isn't like they are a macro powerhouse or anything. But if your advisor is King or Gilchrist, sure, you'll be at good hands.

If you have free time, I'd recommend doing some studies before the program starts. If you haven't taken any game theory class for example, then it might be quite useful to watch Yale's undergrad game theory classes online (by Ben Polak). Or if you have never seen any dynamic macro, get acquinted with it by studying the basic Ramsey model chapter from David Romer. Though I've just skimmed it, Andolfatto's macro book looked good to me for bridging the undergrad and grad macro. I'm not suggesting you to learn the master's material beforehand, but it's good to know what to expect from courses for motivational purposes. Otherwise, you might just find yourself memorizing solution methods and applying them to problems without knowing why you are doing all that.

You should definitely let MSU know that you've acceptances from ASU and UWash, but you'd accept their offer if they admit you.

If this is all about providing a better future to your children, I think you should rather focus your time, money and energy on *their* education. I got to know a couple of students from developing countries who did their undergrad studies in the US where they were funded by the schools they attended (I really don't know the details though). Or they can themselves try to get some grad education in the US after they are done with their undergrad studies in Brazil (and there must be some great institutions for undergrad studies in Brazil). The thing is, yes, US provides great opportunities to its citizens, and I can definitely understand a person from a developing country wanting to emigrate. But as many others pointed out, your kids may not be able to take advantage of those opportunities. They have at least one parent who has a stable job, good education with multiple degrees, and good knowledge of English and maths. This is already much more than where most of us, people from developing countries, started off.

I'm not sure what the question is. Of course, you'll be at a disadvantage against students coming from higher ranked programs with 5 years of training. The question is whether you need to compare yourself with them. I assume you'll apply to jobs in the UK, and most other applicants will have a background similar to yours. If you haven't covered the first year phd material, then there is a serious problem. As a phd student, you're supposed to have covered those. But if it's only the electives you skipped, I wouldn't bother much. There are topics courses which help students to get to know a specific field or get acquinted with the recent research in a field. But, if what you'll be working on for your dissertation is already determined, topics courses do not matter much in the short run. Then there are technical electives such as time-series, computational methods, etc. Depending on your dissertation topic, you'll need to self-teach those to yourself. As for whether you should change your university, it depends on what you want to do with your life. I assume you can get the track record of the graduates of your phd program. If you're not happy with the prospects, and if you think you have better outside options, sure, you might seriously consider changing programs.

I don't think there is any department which can be comparable to UMN in terms of the degree of integration with the regional fed. I'm lazy to google, but from what I remember, one of their most important figures at UMN (Kocherlakota) became the president of Minneapolis Fed. There are (were) economists at Fed who used to teach at UMN and advise students (e.g. McGratten and Storesletten). Many other faculty at UMN is affiliated with the Fed, and their best students always get an internship there (that's what I was told by an UMN faculty). So I'm not sure you can compare this with other schools/Feds. Maybe you can give us some info about the level of interaction/cooperation between Boston Fed and Boston College?

Which programs are you admitted to?

Thanks for your input.

The Keynes quote right after mentioning your long-run goals was kind of... weird.

Which comments of yours are conceited? Almost all of them, including this last one. You mentioned this quote before (in the original thread of the post if I'm not mistaken), and I explained that I didn't seriously mean it and all I wanted was to give the OP his own medicine. Upon that you accused me for trolling (which was kinda correct for that particular post given the original definition of troll in internet slang). Now, you're bringing up the same issue. As if we didn't talk about it and didn't make any clarification... Anyhow, as you suggested, I'm moving along as I don't see any possibility to reason you. You tell us, we're all ears listening to your wisdom.

Whole this time, we read these conceited comments of yours, and actually you're not in the grad school (or re-applying)?

Drop CMU from your list if you have a tight budget for applications. It's a great department, but they just admit a couple of people each year.

I wasn't aware that there are programs with three years of coursework. But then, this means that you only have the fourth and fifth years for doing research, and if you want to get a job at the end of the fifth year, you need to rely on the research you conducted in your fourth year (as you'd market it in your last year during your job hunt). I don't believe that one year of research would be sufficient for anybody to get a job which would reflect their true potential. You'll be competing with people who come from programs in which students are asked to do some sort of research by the second year. (Though third-year seems to be more common.)

37% of economists do macro, 41% do micro and the rest does metrics. Of course there are people focusing on more than one field, but these are the numbers when they are asked their primary field of concentration. Now that you learned the distribution, hope you're satisfied. edit: mistyped macro first time. very sorry about that.