Education and Economics

What do you think of the following program at Teacher's College, Columbia University?

This program is intended for individuals who want to acquire advanced training in the theory, methods, and practices in the economics of education. It is a selective program to prepare individuals for leadership roles in teaching, research, or administrative settings.

The coursework for this program consists of three parts: core courses, courses in research methods, and courses in a specialized area of study. The available specialized areas include: education and economic development, education and transition to work, educational finance, economic evaluation and cost analysis in education, economics of urban and minority education, economics of educational technology, teachers markets, and others.

Examples of Specializations:

* Education and economic development
* Education and the transition to work
* Educational finance
* Economics of urban and minority education
* Economic evaluation of education
* Economics of new educational technology
* Teacher markets


How to Apply- Teachers College

Seeking your advice: Which Economics Department do you recommed?

Maryland, NYU Economics or GMU Economics?

Not the time to be thinking of doing a PhD

Andrew Delbanco, the chairman of the American studies program at Columbia University, said that the system producing graduate students was increasingly out of sync with the system hiring them.

“It’s been obvious for some time — witness the unionization movement — that graduate students are caught between the old model of apprentice scholars and the new reality of insecure laborers with uncertain employment prospects,” Mr. Delbanco said. “Among the effects of the financial crisis will clearly be shrinkage both in graduate fellowships and in entry-level academic positions, so the prospects for aspiring Ph.D.’s are getting even bleaker.”

-Doctoral Candidates Anticipate Hard Times

A description of Argentina

By an Argentinean economics PhD student;

Just in case, Argentina is a country in South America, yes, down south, we speak Spanish, dance tango, and default sovereign debt every other year. The capital city is Buenos Aires, la reina del Plata. It’s a city by a wide river, the Río de la Plata (translated as River Plate).

Good advice on field research

Confessions of a hustler;

Like many a researcher I felt the extractiveness of these interviews -- acutely. You tell yourself that the study is for the greater good -- that it will change policies and perceptions for the benefit of all. And indeed I think it has, at least more than I imagined.

Even so, I see now that these interviews were also a hustle. Me, scouring displacement camps for rebel leaders and victims, hungrily asking questions. Them, answering questions in the hopes that I could give them something, would give them something, in return for information. And if nothing else, I was simply a way to relieve the boredom of life in a displacement camp.

There is something very morally challenging in field work among the very poor. You fear that you exploit them. With your cleverness, wealth and influence, you think you must also protect them. But Sudhir realizes that he has overestimated his cleverness and underestimated theirs. He is using them for a selfish as well as a greater good, and they him.

Top Ten Economics research faculties

Ranking from Chronicle of Higher Education

The Suffolk University Economics Ph.D. program

The Suffolk University Economics Ph.D. program

via Austrian Economists

A Superstar Economics Faculty

David Warsh writes;

Something of a test of the balance of power may come this spring at the University of California at Berkeley, where professors in the economics department, one of the top half-dozen in the nation, are targets of ten outside offers. Every spring departments all over the country seek to improve their standing by hiring from their rivals, a little like free agent season in big league sports. Bids are always out. But the suspense at Berkeley this year is unusually intense.

Development economist Chang-Tai Hsieh already has preferred an offer from the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago to one from Stanford. Other targets of multiple offers include applied microeconomist David Card, a Clark medalist who is a department unto himself; husband-and-wife macroeconomists Christina and David Romer; growth economist Charles Jones; public finance specialist Raj Chetty; not to mention several members of Berkeley’s remarkable junior faculty, led by wunderkind theorist Yuliy Sannikoff and international economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas. Meanwhile, star information economist Hal Varian has gone off to be chief economist for Google (to whom he consulted for many years, growing wealthy from his options grants), and Nobel laureate George Akerlof, a youthful presence in Evans Hall, is retiring.

The University of California was founded in 1868 (eleven years after San Jose State was established as a normal school to train teachers for the post-gold-rush frontier), and Cal entered the national rankings of top US universities in 1906 (as number six). Its Berkeley campus has been among the top five research universities ever since. A remarkably far-sighted plan, adopted in 1960, freed the University of California at Los Angeles to compete for resources with Berkeley, beefed up four other campuses of the university (San Francisco, Davis, Santa Barbara and Riverside), created three new branches (in San Diego, Irvine and Santa Cruz), and greatly expanded the state college system.

Berkeley’s place as the brightest jewel in this crown is secure today — by one count, 28 of its 35 departments are ranked among the top six departments nationally. But its economics department is on the edge of this distribution, and with salaries for economists rapidly rising disproportionately across the land, Berkeley economics’ gallant resistance to the trend could finally begin to crumble this year, with the California state budget facing a deficit of more than $15 billion. Gov. Arnold Schwartzenegger is calling for across-the-board ten percent cuts, including education, in a budget on which the legislature is supposed to act by July 1...

Berkeley may yet come through; it has tottered on the precipice before. Its behavioral economists are led by Nobel laureate Daniel McFadden, Oliver Williamson and Clark Medalist Matthew Rabin. The presence of Joseph Farrell, Michael Katz, Enrico Moretti, Daniel Rubinfeld and Carl Shapiro give it a lock on a certain kind of applied industrial organization. Maurice Obstfeld, Alan Auerbach, J. Bradford DeLong and Emmanuel Saez assure that Berkeley macroeconomics won’t wink out altogether. The department has its own offers out, too, naturally, including one to James Hines of the University of Michigan. What Berkeley economics desperately needs is a faculty entrepreneur to serve as department chair, someone to wheel and deal for it the way John Dunlop did for Harvard economics in the 1960s. But the next chair has yet to be chosen.

An Econ PhD Thesis Without Tears and other advice

All from Professor John Creedy;

A Guide to starting and writing research

A Guide to publishing in economics

A PhD Thesis Without Tears

How to be a jack of all development trades

You need to go to Harvard’s MPAID program according Chris Blattman;

For all other development careers, I would endorse the ID program with gusto. Yes, a PhD program has its benefits, but the opportunity cost in terms of alternative experience (and foregone earnings!) is enormous. A PhD makes you a one-trick pony. An MPA or MPA/ID plus three or four years of work experience makes you a handy jack of all development trades.

It is great advise- just one thing in terms of the benefits, I wouldn't count too much on the following;

Job placement has been outstanding, especially if you are interested in working for one of the IFIs (international financial institutions like the World Bank or IADB). The ID brand is exceptionally strong there. I think this is a reflection of great screening and selection of students, but also a superb network and a terrific environment and teaching.

But is Harvard’s MPAID program the ‘best development curriculum in the world’. I give some alternatives below;

1- Princeton’s MPAID

2- Columbia's MPA in Program in Economic Policy Management. The Director of the program is an eminent economist, Guillermo Calvo.

The program, which started in 1992 as a cooperative effort of Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), Graduate School of Business, and Department of Economics, draws upon the considerable faculty and other resources of these and other divisions of the University. In addition, the program has operated as a partnership with the World Bank. Funding for 15 students is granted by the Joint Japan / World Bank Graduate Scholarship Program. Students who successfully complete all requirements of the Program in Economic Policy Management will be awarded the degree of Master of Public Administration (MPA) from the school.

3. Williams College MPA in Development Economics

The Center for Development Economics (CDE) at Williams College offers an intensive, one academic year, master's degree program designed for economists from low and middle-income countries who have some practical experience. The goal of the program is to provide students with a thorough understanding of the development process, emphasizing analytical techniques helpful to policymakers. The result is an effective mix of theory and policy application that enables students to be more objective in their home environment.

So what are the other similar programs? Dani Rodrik may want to comment on the Columbia program- I understand he was involved in starting that program?

The Making of Dani Rodrik- the economist

I remember well what settled it for me. One day in the library, I picked up copies of the flagship publications of the two disciplines--the American Political Science Review and the American Economic Review--and put them side by side. One was written in English, the other in Greek. I thought that if I did a PhD in economics, I would be able to read both journals, but that if I did a PhD in political science, it would be goodbye economics. That was my epiphany. (I should add that many political science programs now provide solid technical training that no longer leaves the AER beyond reach--but that was not true at the time.)

-Why I became an economist

There's something about a British Education

What does the following people have in common- Tim Harford, Mervyn King , Martin Wolf, Charles Kenny, Samuel Brittan , Sebastian Mallaby

None of them have a PhD in economics- yet they are all respected 'economists'. Are we wasting time with an American education? What do you think is there secret?

The Logic of Life

Tim Harford's new book


Would he be considered an economist in the US- he has an M.Phil in economics?

Anyway his books are great, now go and order the book

Solow and superficial kind of originality

Another quote from Solow (emphasis mine);

What about my peculiar belief in the importance of group enterprises? I am not sure there is any parallel or analogue in economic method. Maybe it explains why I think teaching is an important activity and itself part of the advance of knowledge, and why I sometimes have the feeling that we demand too much of a superficial kind of “originality” from our graduate students. But that would probably be stretching it.

-Bob Solow, Eminent Economists: Their Life Philosophies, p.274

See also Time Management Tips from Bob Solow

I've found a mentor

How to get a PhD *and* save the world

Introduction to Econometrics

Another very good set of notes on Introductory Econometrics

Econometric Analysis of Panel Data

Mathematics for Economists

Another good set of lecture notes from Peter N. Ireland

Is an Oxford degree worth the parchment it's printed on?

Statistics vs. Econ (Re: Is an Oxford degree worth the parchment it's printed on?);

1. A lot of interesting papers are being written by economists now, but I'm also a big fan of papers by psychologists. Psychologists will cram the results of ten different experiments into a single article. Instead of just exploring a question with a single dataset, they'll really try to figure things out, running different experiments to consider different possibilities.

As to the question of why don't statisticians write more interesting applied papers: I don't know. I suppose people go into statistics because they like math, not because they care about any particular application. I've seen some pretty crappy applied work by well known and respected statisticians--people whose theoretical work I respect a lot. The best scientific work by statisticians is probably not social science but rather in biology, the most famous example being R. A. Fisher's model unifying the genetics of discrete and continuous traits (I hope I'm not garbling that too much). Also, yeah, there are more economists, and they're in a more competitive field, so maybe they put more effort into promoting their own work. (Yes, I know, I'm one to talk, seeing as I promote my own work all the time, but maybe I'm not typical of statisticians.)

2. I think it's easier to get into a top statistics Ph.D. program than to get into a top econ program. I'm a big fan of stat Ph.D. programs, especially if you can work with a good advisor and do some interesting stuff. I don't know the deal with the math GRE. We used to require it at Columbia but we'd get a lot of applicants who hadn't taken it, and we'd consider their applications too, so it seemed only fair to diminish it to a recommendation rather than a requirement.

Rules for being a successful empirical economist

Conversations With History - Richard B. Freeman

1. You’ve to like numbers

2. You’ve to listen to people [from the real world, businessmen, labor unions, etc] and get out of office and talk to people

3. Ability to abstract … and build mathematical models.

Berkely need to modernize their style of interviews- and open up for questions in advance for interviewers.

HT: New Economist

Related;
Video about Richard Freeman

"Feminization of Work in the U SA: A New Era for (Man)kind?"

"White Hats or Don Quixotes? Human Rights Vigilantes in the Global Economy"

"What Role for Labor Standards in the Global Economy"

"Working for Nothing: The Supply of Volunteer Labor"
"Does Inequality in Skills Explain Inequality of Earnings Across Countries"

A Fairer Sort of Harvard;

Last spring protesting students at Harvard demanded that the university pay all of its workers at least a living wage and that it stop contracting with outside companies for low-wage work. Faced with unflattering national publicity, Harvard set up a committee of faculty members, administrators, students and employees to look at the situation of its low-wage workers and make recommendations. The protests had raised a fundamental question: Does a major employer like Harvard have a responsibility to be a good employer to workers, or should it seek to get by with the least it can in the labor market?

The last time Harvard faced this question was in December 1929, when the State of Massachusetts ordered it to pay female building cleaners the state minimum wage of 37 cents an hour, 2 cents above what the university had been paying. Choosing to get by with the least it could, Harvard fired the cleaning women and directed other workers to do their jobs.

This time Harvard is going in a very different direction. Its committee's report, which came out this week, documents the substantial decline in the real wages of custodians and other low-paid employees. It describes how the threat that work would be contracted out has put pressure on unionized workers to accede to low pay. If the committee's recommendations are adopted next month by Harvard's president, Lawrence Summers -- as is likely, given his positive reaction to the report -- the university will be committed to treating its lower-wage workers as full members of the university community and to giving them decent wages, respect for their work and opportunities for further training.

The committee also recommends pay increases that would take the lowest wages to between $10.83 and $11.30 an hour from $8.50. These rates are based on what the committee felt collective bargaining would have produced absent the threat of outsourcing to lower-wage contractors. The recommended pay levels exceed the levels in the living wage law that the City of Cambridge applies to municipal employees and city contractors.

Contrary to the fears of some alumni, students and administrators, the committee did not cave in to student demands for setting low-level pay according to a living wage formula, about which there could be considerable controversy, or to end outsourcing. Though it recommends a wage floor for the present, the heart of its proposal is something else: a parity wage and benefits policy for contractors, based on collective bargaining. Companies under contract to provide workers at Harvard would have to pay wages equivalent to the wages for Harvard's unionized employees doing comparable work. The Harvard unions would be bargaining, in effect, for minimum wages and benefits for the employees of contractors as well as for themselves, even though those outside workers might not be union members.

Richard Freeman awarded IZA Prize 2007

DATA SETS:
Public Sector Collective Bargaining Law Data Set
Occupational Wages around the World (OWW) Database
Worker Representation and Participation Survey (WRPS)

How Mankiw did his PhD in 2 years

Mankiw writes;

Yes, I managed to earn a PhD in two years of residence at MIT. Here is how:

1. During my last year as an undergrad at Princeton, I took the standard graduate sequence in micro and macro. When I arrived at MIT, I was effectively a second-year PhD student.
2. After my first year at MIT, I went for a year to Harvard Law School, where I was more concerned about writing economics articles than being a diligent law student.
3. After the year in law school, I went to the CEA as a staff economist, where I worked for senior staff economist Larry Summers, who served also as an academic adviser. Because I worked on research between CEA tasks, when I returned to MIT for my second year, I had much of my dissertation already completed.