rockystone2018

Frankfurt, for several reasons: 1. It is sometimes ranked among the top 100. 2. Frankfurt already sent people to top 10 PhD programs in the US. See e.g. him Economists - Christian Matthes - Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond I am not aware of anybody from Alicante managing to get into a top PhD program. 3. You will benefit from Frankfurt in terms of location because it's where the ECB is.

That might suffice for top 20.

I would advise you to go to Duke. ITFD is the "cash cow" of the Barcelona GSE and people graduating from there usually do not go on straight to PhD programs, since ITFD does not prepare you well for Econ PhDs.

Sure, everybody I have talked to loved it in Tinbergen and the funding there is really good. The Barcelona GSE master is particularly badly managed. They tend to make announcements but then do not commit to them. It was announced that students need to take all advanced classes in order to get admitted to the PhD program at UPF. However, due to "miscommunication issues", some people who took only 2 or 3 advanced courses were admitted to the PhD program (while others that took the advanced courses did not.) The placement of the Barcelona GSE is overrated. If you look at the people, they are mostly local students from Barcelona who did their undergraduate degrees at UPF. That is, they use their connections and grades from the undergrad at UPF to apply to top 20 US PhD programs during their master year at the Barcelona GSE.

If you look up the people that got placed at top 10 places in the US, you will see that most of them are local student from Barcelona who have done their undergraduate at UPF already. These people tend to use their connections and grades from undergrad to apply to top 10-20 US. They normally enrol in the BGSE master because they need a "gap" year in order to prepare the time-intensive applications. If you do not have any previous connections to UPF or a strong pedigree from another top school, you may only have a shot at top 10-20 US, if you rank among the top 5-10 persons in the Econ master class, otherwise not!

Tinbergen.

To me it seems that you are making a mistake. It is true that the Barcelona GSE placed people in North America. However, it does not harm to look up who those people actually are. People who are placed in top 20 US are predominantly (not all, but most of them) local students from Barcelona who completed their undergraduate studies at UPF already. These people tend to use the Master's program in order to take the time to apply for the PhD programs. (PhD applications in North America are - as you probably know - really time-intensive.) Because of the timing, they usually just show the grades from the undergrad and the grades in the Master do not play any role. So it is in practice the undergrad from UPF and the contacts they made there that get them in. In practice, a high number of students from the Barcelona GSE continue with their PhDs at the local programs, e.g. UPF. If you have no previous connections to UPF and no other pedigree from a top institution elsewhere, maybe if you are among the top 5 students at the Barcelona GSE you have a shot at the top 10-20 in the US, otherwise probably not! Think well about whether it is worth it. Students tend not to be happy with the organization/management of the Barcelona GSE master program.