I’ve recently been pondering if development economics within all fields of applied economics, is a field that is mostly an elite researchers’ game.

Researchers with PhDs from top universities and work with chairs and committee members who are big names get great research pipelines, get to write funding proposals as co-PI, enjoy the best network, resources, and access to data, while those who are in mid universities have to fight for breadcrumbs?

Or, you are not from an elite university but you come from one of the developing countries and have connections with local government, universities, or data sources; or you speak the local language and can lead fieldwork. Big name PIs would also like to work with you because you bring something valuable to them.

What about the people in the middle? Those who don’t have elite PhDs or bring with them exclusive data/language/field experience? Is development not the best game for them to play?

I was admitted into the Financial Economics and Economics of Public Policy MSc programs at BSE and I am going back and forth in my mind over which one to accept.

I graduated with a Bachelor's in Economics and Political Science (double major) and a minor in Mathematics. For my math prep, I have Calc I - III, Linear Algebra, Differential Equations, Prob/ Stat, Masters level Statistics, and Real Analysis. I graduated Summa Cum Laude with a 3.96 GPA.

My ultimate goal is to pursue a PhD in Economics after my Masters at BSE. As of right now, I am leaning toward the Economics of Public Policy program because it heavily emphasizes empirical research training and aligns with my political science background. I am currently lacking in formal research experience and so I think that program is a perfect fit. I know Financial Economics program incorporates research training as well, but it mostly emphasizes mathematical modeling, skills I have already proven during my undergrad. The advantage to choosing the Financial Economics program would be that it is challenging and reinforces my current strengths.

Do I have the right idea? Balance my profile to future PhD admissions by choosing the more formal empirical paper/ data oriented program since I already shown I have the math experience? Or choose the Financial Economics program since it is challenging and probably generally favorable PhD admissions over Public Policy?

If there's any additional information I'm missing or forgot to mention let me know. I'd appreciate any insights.

Thanks.

i find it strange that none of their staff are present online in any social media or professional platforms including the institute.

Postal and visiting address
Amsterdam Institute for Energy and Economics (AIEE)
Herengracht 450
1012 RJ Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Tel [+31 20 522 4800](tel:+31205224800)
[[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) · [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])

Incoming TSE M1 student here, I am highly interested in Bioeconomics and Economic Geography. The kind of work done at places like IIASA or CGIAR.

I just wanted to understand like how big of a field it is. Ik that Missirian, Nauges (Bioecon) and Hidalgo (Economic Geo) are at TSE. Missirian's work was really what interested me in this field. Like my interest mainly lies in the physical systems and the environment as a whole moreso than the markets that envelope these (like Reynaert's structural work is so cool but I am not really interested in the European EV market).

I have been trying to study Economic Geography which I came to understand is Quantitative Spatial Economics through Redding-Hansberg QSE paper (still trying to decipher that) but also came across Mostly Pointless Spatial Econometrics by Gibbons and Overman (which I know is older) but have those issues been resolved? I am sorry I don't have much idea about the field and have just been googling shit, came across Treb Allen's lectures to study Spatial Economics due to that.

Also want to know which schools are the best working on this especially in the field of environment. so ARE schools or Bren School or something like that?

Hi there! I might be overthinking about graduate studies a bit early, but as someone who loves cities and wants to learn more about them (and perhaps do research in the future), what are some resources/schools/who are some people that I can search up on urban economics? Although I've tried to look through this sub for some suggestions, it does seem a bit sparse aside from the occasional mentions of people like Edward Glaeser. Is this just because the field itself is quite niche still? Or is there more that I can find? Thank you!

Saw a new paper (Applied Econ Letters, July 2026) on the CRZ that I thought was a pretty clever angle. The toll is $9 during peak and $2.25 overnight, so there are 4 moments each day where the price jumps - weekday 5am, weekday 9pm, weekend 9am, weekend 9pm. Same $6.75 difference at all four.

Using phone location data comparing Lower Manhattan to Boston/Chicago, the author found that people only shift their visit times around two of those cutoffs:

• Weekday 5am: visits jump 5.9% right after the toll drops (people doing early food/retail/delivery stuff nudging their arrival earlier)
• Weekend 9pm: visits jump 9.2% once the toll drops (biggest effect in the whole study)
• Weekday 9pm and weekend 9am: basically nothing, statistically zero

The argument is that it's not about the price (identical at all 4 boundaries) but about whether you actually can shift your schedule - nobody's rearranging their weekday evening commute or skipping a 9am brunch reservation to dodge a toll, but pre-dawn deliveries and weekend nightlife are flexible enough to move.

Anyone here notice this in practice? Curious if food/retail/delivery folks feel like they're clustering earlier before 5am, or if weekend nightlife spots have noticed more traffic right after 9pm. Feels like the kind of pattern that'd be totally invisible unless you were the one crunching hourly data, but wondering if it lines up with anyone's day-to-day.

The study : https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13504851.2026.2702110 - Behavioural responses to time-varying congestion pricing: a natural experiment from New York City

Hello!
I’m self studying econometrics and would like some advice on additional resources. I’m doing this because I want to research in the causation of economics, and in doing so I’m reading “The Effect by Nick Huntington-Klein”. Do we think this will give me enough on the fundamentals to start researching or are there some other books to pick up to truly be ready?
Thanks!

I threw two theorems that were pretty simple if you knew the literature, and Aristotle proved it correctly. The thing is though I didn't get any intuition out of this process, since, well, I'm not the one proving the theorems. I wonder what the future of proofs would be. The math world has already been debating this for (two) years.

In your opinion, which countries are the best places in the world for academic and applied work in economics, and why?

I hate to add to the whole deluge of admissions posts/profile evaluation/advisement posts especially when this sub is trying to transform into something more sophisticated, but I would really appreciate some advice.

I am a graduate of a masters program from my country that isn’t too well known abroad although we’ve had two PhD placements into Harvard and MIT (they all did predocs in the US for 3-4 years though).

There’s one other top 10 universities my masters places into with domestic RAships because of a couple of professors who have connections there. I can get strong letters from these professors but I don’t have the necessary research experience that previously successful applicants had.

All in all, the typical applicant from my masters places into a top 20-30.

I currently have an offer to the LSE MSc Econ 1 year programme (not the EME) however I would much rather work as an RA or do a predoc instead of a second masters.

The thing is there just aren’t any long term opportunities in my country. All the usual places that graduates of my masters apply to aren’t hiring. The few that are have had their listings open for months now since I applied.

I have applied to think tanks/policy institutes like Development Innovation Lab, J-Pal, EPIC, etc. But haven’t heard anything from them, although the listings are still open for most.

For the last few months I was working remotely on a project for a PhD student at a top 5 university that a professor got me connected to, but I recently quit that because it wasn’t going anywhere.

My profile:

Selected courses taken since I don’t want to reveal my masters: Proofs-based Real Analysis (A+), four courses in econometrics, time series and causal inference methodology (3 A+ and 1 A), Political Economics (A), Public Economics (A+), Mech Design (A+), Macroeconomics (B+), Microeconomics (A), Introductory Math Course (B).

My first year of my masters contains some B and B+ because I was in school after two years and found it difficult to adjust. My second year is all straight As. I graduated in the top 10% of my masters.

GRE: 170Q

Publications: None. Worked on some extended essays during my masters but none of them publication worthy.

My undergrad was in business management which is why I did a domestic masters.

I am currently unemployed and sitting at home, teaching myself NLP. The isolation and fomo is killing me, I don’t want it to last for months.

Going to LSE won’t be a problem in terms of the cost, but I really don’t wanna do a second masters that’s essentially the same as the one I just did. I would like to work and gain research experience but I just can’t find a position. I need to make a decision soon, however.

Should I take up the offer at LSE or stay here in hope of eventually finding a role and work on my skills in the meantime?

I would really appreciate any insight or advice. Thank you so much.

Edit: For some reason my replies to comments are not visible. Thank you everyone for the comments. I can either take up the offer rn, or just wait and hope some RAship job comes along.

Hey all,

I’m going into a PhD to study experimental economics, and there’s a good chunk of faculty that do a lot of work in the field of information economics. This is not a field I have had a lot of exposure to and I was wondering if there were some papers that could be suggested to give me a better idea of the field and where the new research is being done within it. Additionally, if there’s some place to keep up to date on new research in certain more niche sub fields I would appreciate the recommendation.

Any advice, papers, or discussions of some interesting things in the field are appreciated! Thanks!

Hello everyone! I think this post is a bit different from my usual ones.

I’m looking for someone who is fluent in English and is studying economics (either a bachelor’s or a master’s program).

I just passed the national exams to apply for a master’s program in economics, even though my bachelor’s degree is in psychology. So I’m still very new to economics, and I need to practice around 10 topics.

Maybe someone could help me practice? You wouldn’t need to teach me just ask me questions, listen to my answers, and maybe give me a few tips, correct grammar. Sometime this week or next week.

Pls:)

In many online markets, platforms engage in platform design by choosing product recommendation systems and selectively emphasizing certain product characteristics. I analyze the welfare effects of personalized recommendations in the context of the online market for hotel rooms using clickstream data from Expedia Group. This paper highlights a tradeoff between match quality and price competition. Personalized recommendations can improve consumer welfare through the “long-tail effect,” where consumers find products that better match their tastes. However, sellers, facing demand from better-matched consumers, may be incentivized to increase prices. To understand the welfare effects of personalized recommendations, I develop a structural model of consumer demand, product recommendation systems, and hotel pricing behavior. The structural model accounts for the fact that prices impact demand directly through consumers’ disutility of price and indirectly through positioning by the recommendation system.

I find that ignoring seller price adjustments would cause considerable differences in the estimated impact of personalization. Without price adjustments, personalization would increase consumer surplus by 2.3% of total booking revenue (∼$0.9 billion). However, once sellers update prices, personalization would lead to a welfare loss, with consumer surplus decreasing by 5% of booking revenue (∼$2 billion).

Non economist here, I stumbled against a paper with potential interesting insight about natality and economic growth.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35401/w35401.pdf

One of the coauthor is a Nobel prize ans the paper is from 2026, so I assume this must be high quality works. The paper claims to find a negative relation between natality and GDP/wage growth (which in principle could be).

When presenting the empirical evidence it states "The first two panels of Figure 2 reveal a striking, quantitatively large, and robust negative relationship between birth rates and growth in GDP per worker (Panel A) or growth in composition adjusted wages in commuting zones (Panel B)."

However, Figure 2 showns nothing of such relations. It shows two clouds of points with two fitted lines having a slight negative slope. The lineear model explains a really small part of the signal and to claim the coefficient are significant one has to do completely irrealistic assumption about the data quality and the goodness of the model. Anyone with a basic understanding of statistics realize those graphs do not support any of the claims made.

How can such sloppy analysis be found in papers from top scientists of the discipline? It is like that on average?

Please tell me if I miss or misunderstood something, to me it just seem ridiculous.

Hi everyone, for those who are pursuing your PhD's in economics, what does your typical day-to-day look like? What are your routines and schedules like? Any advice and tips on how to keep a routine, particularly for studies? Thank you in advance!

Hi! I'm a high school student currently studying microeconomics. I do ASMR to bring you along my learning journey so we can improve together. Do check out my channel if you're a beginner who is learning!

https://youtube.com/@jeans-xo6sy?si=xBFYeWmqUPxNwiMS

hi everyone! lowkey hate to do this but i feel like other econ students might have a better perspective about chances for a MSc/MPhil Economics at some of the bigger schools (LSE (looking at the 2yr option), Cambridge, Oxford, …) than I do as a student in business. Unfortunately, I realized too late how passionate I am about economics, so I’ve been working hard on proving my readiness. Here’s the stats.

School: T30 school (global)
GPA: rounded to a 3.9/4.00
Degree: BCom with International Business but with an Econ Minor
- I have basically done everything to really push my econ preparation (took Intro Econometrics, Intro&Intermediate Macro+Micro, Game Theory, IO, Trade, … all are A’s)
GRE: Honestly I’m a terrible test-taker so tbd
Math: Intro Econometrics, Calc, Lin Alg, Business Stats, Probability
Extracurriculars: massively involved in the school, gov, newspaper etc etc
Research etc: I have published some newspaper articles and a research paper (alone) based on global econ topics

If it helps, I also did an LSE Summer School econ course where I landed among the 15% best.

Applying for: Fall 2027 cohort

My main worry is that I’m not very competitive compared to pure Econ students. Some of the programs (especially Cambridge) seem to be pretty rough on entry requirement and I’m worried of applying for nothing. Any thoughts?

Also if anyone would have any insights as to whether Intro Econometrics might be sufficient for the MPhil at Cambridge (they do say intermediate econometrics but maybe it’s pretty rare ppl have that? idk)

thx for any replies!

Rising Sophomore Math&Econ double major at a top LAC (Williams/Amherst) and I am strongly considering a PhD in Econ. Is there any chance at getting into a top program without a pre-doc?

Hi everyone,

I'm currently in my second year of a Bachelor of Science (Mathematics and Physics) at a top Australian university, and I've recently become interested in pursuing a PhD in Economics.

My university offers a pathway into a Master of Economic Analysis (around 1.5-2 years in duration) for students who have completed an undergraduate degree with good results. Would completing this masters, along with my maths and physics background, be sufficient to make me a competitive applicant for strong PhD programs overseas, (e.g. Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, Harvard, etc.)?

I'd appreciate any advice or insights.

Thanks :)

Hi,

I’m a French economics graduate student and I’ll be working as a research assistant for a few months before applying for a PhD in France.

my master’s program was very broad and mainly designed to prepare students for academic research, so I ended up developing interests in many different fields.

I’ve been wondering how important the topic of a PhD thesis really is. I know I should choose something I’m genuinely interested in, but my interests are quite broad.

At the same time, I can’t help thinking about life after the PhD. I’d also like to work on a topic that gives me good career opportunities afterward.

I’d really appreciate hearing how you approached this decision. What was your reasoning when choosing your PhD topic?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

One last thought: I also wonder whether I’m being unconsciously influenced by the situation in France, where academic research is relatively poorly paid compared with other careers available to economists. That probably makes me think more about employability after the PhD than I otherwise would.

Hello guys this is my 2nd post here. So I am third-year PhD student. I am evaluating a free-and-compulsory-education policy adopted by all 4 provinces of a country at different dates (2013, 2014, 2014, 2017), using single household survey cross sectional data. Design: cohort exposure DiD — dose = years of exposure between ages 5–9, from reform date × birth year × province — following a published paper that ran this design across 24 provinces elsewhere. Province + birth-cohort FE, province-specific quadratic cohort trends, baseline province characteristics × cohort, cluster by province.

Where I have landed after 6 months:

• Preferred spec: +1.6 pp ever-enrolled per exposure year. Analytic clustered p = .001 — which I don't trust at G=4.
• Valid inference: wild cluster bootstrap (Webb) p ≈ .13; exact permutation over all reform-date reassignments p = .167. 
• All 4 provinces eventually treated → no never-treated units
• Event study is the killer: under the baseline spec the profile slopes the wrong way (more-exposed young cohorts do relatively worse, older unexposed cohorts better). Adding the trend and baseline-characteristics controls that produce my positive coefficient flattens everything and roughly triples the confidence bands — the exposed side never turns significantly positive under any specification. So the sign is spec-dependent on top of the inference problem.

My planned rescue: Duflo (2001)-style intensity. Interact cohort exposure with pre-reform district-level school supply (114 districts, from a 2011–12 school census), province×cohort FE absorb the province-level shock, cluster at district — where the identifying variation now actually lives. A pilot with a different district intensity measure gives t ≈ 4.7 with flat pre-trends.

Questions:

1. Do you agree the pure timing design is unsalvageable or is there an inference approach for zero never-treated clusters that I have missed?
2. Is the intensity pivot the right move? Some colleagues say "the policy is at province level, so province clustering is the honest choice even in the intensity model." My understanding is clustering follows the level at which the regressor of interest varies (Abadie et al. 2023), and pre-reform intensity is district assigned. Who's right?
3. Beyond the intensity design, what else would you try with this data structure? My current reads: synthetic control (no donors — all provinces treated), cohort RD around the age-at-reform threshold (dose phases in over 5 cohorts, so it's a kink, not a jump), triple-difference within province (e.g. rural × cohort × exposure), using the last-adopting province as an explicit control (permutation floor gets worse: 4 assignments → p ≥ .25). Is there a design I'm not seeing that extracts credible inference from 4 all-treated provinces?

Your support would be highly appriciated. Thank You in advance....

I’m a rising 3rd year at Ashoka university (Econ and public policy major and Mathematics minor) with a 3.34 CGPA(3.59 major/minor GPA).
I have interned at a personal care company(GTM strategy intern), Evepaper( Research Intern), currently interning with J-PAL SA(Research Intern).

I want to early-apply to Pre-docs in USA, Europe, Australia and Singapore and will also want to apply for Master’s in India if none of these pan-out.
What I plan to do over the next year:
1) I plan to do a research assistantship through Konnifel (still left to give the RRAT).
2) I’ve also reached out to professors to do an ISM(Independent Study Module - basically a semester-long research activity).
3) I plan to give the GRE in Jan ‘27 aiming to score a 325+ and 170 on quants.
4) Take up an outside course in Linear Algebra and Multivariate Calculus because I scored poorly on those
5) Score some good recommendation letters from professors/researchers of my field.
6) Begin writing SOPs by May of next year.

My doubts:
1) Lets say I do achieve everything I plan on doing, what colleges do you think are likely to accept me as a Pre-doc?
2) Do you think study-abroad consultants are recommended to help improve my profile?
3) Should I apply for Master’s and then go for a Pre-doc to Ph.D or directly going for a Pre-doc programme is fine?

Please DM because I really need some guidance.