Longbeach5

It really all depend what you want to do. If you want to be doing research at a big institution then you should go to the top. However, all that falls out of the windoe if you publish before you go out to the market. If you do that, then you will be ahead of the game no matter what school. The issue is that it is difficult to publish unless you've already got some experience, like writing a dissertation. Utah gives good teaching opportunity and their placement seems to be at liberal arts colleges, and mid level research universities. So it all boils down to what kind of job you want after PhD.

utah does better in ranking than other heterodox schools. They are 74th in a 2009 paper that ranked departments by research output. This is likely due to the fact that the department is mixed. There are some heterodox folks and there are some more mainstream economists there.

The political economy description may just be an old description that never changed. From what I know, the course is essentially a critique of non-cooperative game theory.

There's an econometrician there who use to be at Rutgers that does Bayesian work and the department offers a special topic course in the field. I believe his name is Fowles and I've read a paper by him in the American economic Review. Also I've been to a talk by one of their job market PhDs and his model was a Bayesian one, so I am sure it's not a fluke that they put that there. Not many schools offer this.