Marshall

Feel free to add your own ideas. Mine is that adcoms really ought to ask applicants to include a pic, and then include looks as a criteria. After all, on the job market looks probably play some part although nobody would admit it. Since job market outcomes are the most important measure of the program's quality adcoms probably want to maximize future job market performance, and looks are probably marginally more important than another math class, but have a lot better externalities. By the way, if you'd like to learn more about the relevance of looks: Freakonomics » Hamermesh on The Daily Show: Ugly People

Pretty sure berkeley did not have any such requirement. One thing Berkeley does have special is their diversity statement of purpose. Now I'm pretty sure nobody cares about it, but the strange thing is in 1996 CA passed proposition 209, and the next year the Supreme court allowed it to take effect. It banned Affirmative Action in public institutions.

A lot of US MAs don't place well. I've heard on TM a long time ago about one whose top person placed into a 25-50 range econ PhD. Obviously try to go to Canada or Europe. There are some places with funding there, and they're designed for further graduate study. Also for RA positions other than the usual places (FED, Brookings, Urban Institute, JPAL/IPA for development) I'd regularly check Research Assistant Positions not at the NBER

I feel like you don't have to sound like you want to go into academia and consulting. You should pick one and put it down in your SOP, probably teaching since private sector placements usually have a bit of a stigma. Also I think it'd help to talk more about possible future projects/research you'd like to do with your contacts in Australia and your country of origin.

In the top 30 look at Brown. I think they have a lot of urban planning people. However I word of caution. I feel that regional/urban economics is not so much a field (as in a set of questions), but more of a collection of econometric techniques/approaches. I think tons of great papers on urban/regional economics are written by people who generally do environmental, IO, etc., but when they need to will use GIS or spatial econometrics to answer to their questions. Long story short, I think you may miss some great opportunities if you're just looking for dept's people with specializations in regional/urban economics.

I'm not very familiar with who's doing what in SMEs, but in terms of mid-ranked places specializing in development, I think of Maryland, Vanderbilt, and Davis. Georgetown is a lower ranked place that's also good, but I think their admissions is more difficult than comparatively ranked schools so it's not the best choice for safeties. I'd also look into Berkeley ARE because more than half of the development people at Berkeley are in the ARE dept. so econ people at Berkeley frequently work with ARE and vice versa when it comes to development. The development field class is even cross-listed and taught together by the econ and ARE faculty. Still, you are closing yourself off from doing theory or macro, and I'm not sure if they allow you to apply to both Berkeley econ and ARE. Oh yes, and of course there's Cornell--little biased. Don't forget to check out not only their econ faculty but also their AEM (Applied economics and management) faculty, which is their ag econ program. I noticed a lot of the development people going on the job market use AEM profs like Barrett, Kanbur, and Chau. Still, be aware that even if a program has someone specialized in SMEs they could move, or they might not like to work with grad students.

Don't underestimate how hard it is to get your first job in public policy. I had a friend also with a masters who had a really tough time finding anything since he didn't have experience. Also, my impression of the top public policy programs is that they really like experience and they like quantitative backgrounds but it's not necessary to have heavy quant background like in econ. With an econ MA if you get good grades you'll probably be a little above the median in terms of quant. preparation. I think, though, because they place more weight on experience and intangibles (research potential) they probably weight letters even more highly.

Even if it doesn't come out pretty I wouldn't worry too much. AWA is not very important.

Actually, if I had internet access instead of saying what I mentioned earlier I'd just show them this: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

It looks like you've actually got a deeper problem than rekindling your curiosity for statistics. You've got to come up with a way to do well in classes regardless of whether you find them interesting. I mean it sounds like you could have done well, but didn't put in the effort because you dislike cookbook style learning. What happens if your first math econ or econometrics class is taught like that. You've got to be able put up with it and study hard anyway. There was plenty of 1st year material I learned that I thought "why am I learning this?" but studied anyway and I think that's the right attitude. At the very least, it's intellectually open minded.

I make bad guesses and then try to tell a miniscule narcissistic group of people. Thereby diminishing the damage I do. Oh yeah and we teach undergrads. This is basically what I answered a long time ago when somebody was asking me about how to fix the economy (the most common question) and answered I had no idea, but I've got some guesses on what not to do. He was appallingly disappointed, so I decided to go all in about the harsh realities of what we do...hah, and EJMR claims we're too optimistic.

Thought about it some more. Probably my overall pick would be Townsend. I like his work on financial services and his work on financial markets in developing countries was what I wanted to do. Then I started reading his papers. Now I wonder if I could add anything on that topic worth stating.

I'm not an MPA/ID graduate, but my impression is that Harvard's MPA/ID program expects you to get your own funding (personal, corporate or govt.), so just keep that in mind when weighing funded MEDEG Carlos with possible unfunded admissions to Harvard's MPA/ID.

Just wondering if you had an all-time favorite paper or body of work. I'll start with mine. I found this forthcoming ReStats paper from Sadoulet and Janvry pretty cool: http://are.berkeley.edu/~esadoulet/papers/Bolsa%20REStat%20final.pdf. Basically they show empirically if local leaders are up for reelection CCTs have much better outcomes. Thus, ceteris paribus decentralizing CCTs for the sake of efficiency should not occur when a lame duck is in office. Not sure, yet, who I'd pick overall.

Not by this American.