Best deal for a Master’s degree in Economics?

This has got to be one of the best deals around. I got this mail from the highly ranked Toulouse School of Economics,

Tuition fees for [the English language] Master’s degree amount around 300 Euros for one academic year. Social security (compulsory health insurance) for students amounts 200 Euros per academic year. For living expenses in Toulouse, you should count at least 500 Euros per month (survival) and more probably 700 to 800 Euros all included.

Best regards
Aude Schloesing

Toulouse School of Economics
Université Toulouse 1
Manufacture des Tabacs
31042 Toulouse Cedex (France)
tel: + 33 (0)5 61 12 87 65
fax: + 33 (0)5 61 12 86 37
tse@univ-tlse1.fr

Best universities in economics

1	Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)	USA	5.75
2	Harvard U	USA	5.56
3	Yale U	USA	4.99
4	Princeton U	USA	4.76
5	U Chicago	USA	4.64
6	U Toulouse I (Sciences Sociales)	France	3.87
7	U California - Berkeley	USA	3.77
8	Northwestern U	USA	3.73
9	New York U (NYU)	USA	3.66
10	London School of Economics	UK	3.57
11	U Pennsylvania	USA	3.51
12	U California - San Diego	USA	3.25
13	U California - Los Angeles	USA	3.19
14	Stanford U	USA	3.12
15	Boston U	USA	3.08
16	U Wisconsin - Madison	USA	3.07
17	U Rochester	USA	3.03
18	U Texas - Austin	USA	3.01
19	Columbia U	USA	2.93
20	Brown U	USA	2.85

Source: Productivity ranking from econphd.net. The ranking is based on the average number of equivalent papers published by a department’s top 15 authors.

Economics in Toulouse is now taught (in English) in the Toulouse School of Economics, research takes place in the excellent Institut D’Economie Industrielle.

The Paris School of Economics

Why start the new Paris School of Economics? Why not build up the already existing world-class Institut D’Economie Industrielle in Toulouse? (Here is an article about IDEI by David Warsh).

One possibility is that the IDEI is too free-market oriented for the French establishment. The French establishment, both on the left and on the right, is statist.

And of course there is a long French tradition of having the best of everything in Paris. A French academic who made it to one of the Paris institutes is not about to go into exile in the provinces. So if there is a large group of good economists in Paris, why not organize them into a school and gain critical mass?

There is now also a Toulouse School of Economics. It offers various programs, including a two year master’s degree program, taught in English.

History of Finance

Streaming videos of interviews with Harry Markowitz, William Sharpe, Paul Samuelson and Robert Merton from the American Finance Association.

Haidt on the five foundations of morality

Here is a video where Jonathan Haidt talks about the five foundations of morality,

1. harm/care,
2. fairness/reciprocity,
3. ingroup/loyalty,
4. authority/respect,
5. purity/sanctity

He makes the point that political liberals (in the American sense) have moral intuitions primarily based upon the first two foundations, and therefore misunderstand the moral motivations of political conservatives, who generally rely upon all five foundations (see also here).

But why exactly five and only five foundations? Any proof that there couldn’t be more?

Homage to Reid Bryson

Interview with Reid Bryson, “the father of the science of modern climatology.”

Via CCNet.

Top UK Universities

The Guardian has published its new ranking of UK universities. As usual Oxford and Cambridge are ranked highest. They are usually followed by Imperial College, London School of Economics, and University College London. This year’s surprise is University of St. Andrews, ranked fourth, behind Oxford, Cambridge, and Imperial.

St. Andrews is ranked 7th in the UK Good University Guide.

St. Andrews seems to be doing an excellent job with student satisfaction and teaching quality, but its employability and job placement performance is less than stellar.

Lunch with Jeffrey Sachs

When British journalists are good, they are very, very good. Read this interview with Jeffrey Sachs by Chris Giles in Financial Times.

Business strategy books

When teaching business strategy to MBA students in Europe, it is not obvious which texts you should use. Strategy books published in the U.S. tend to assume that students know the American context.

So, which books to use? One popular textbook is Carpenter & Sanders, Strategic Management: A Dynamic Perspective. A dynamic perspective? Why not add a few more buzzwords; global, integrated, systems, stakeholder, win-win?

I have previously used Robert Grant’s Contemporary Strategy Analysis. It was fairly concise when it came out, but with succeeding editions it became more and more bloated. However, the latest edition has shed 60 pages. Maybe it is worth taking a look at it again.

A really excellent book is R. Preston McAfee’s Competitive Solutions: The Strategist’s Toolkit. So far, it is the best book for teaching strategy I have seen.

Bob Trivers gets the Crafoord Prize in Biosciences

We are a bit late, but here is the announcement from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences,

… Robert Trivers, is one of the small group of pioneering scientists who began to ponder on the social behaviour patterns of animals and how they might have arisen through evolution. Between 1971 and 1976, he launched five ideas that have been of the greatest importance for the development of sociobiology. They have inspired many behavioural ecologists, who have to a large extent confirmed Trivers’s ideas.

The glory of war

What do Harvard’s new president Drew Gilpin Faust and the War Nerd have in common?

In an article published in 2004 in the journal Civil War History, Faust explores the place of war in American politics and culture today. War, she writes, “offers an authenticity and intensity of experience” missing elsewhere in modern society. It provides “a moment of truth,” when soldiers and civilians alike “have to define their deeply held priorities and act on them.” [Source: Jon Wiener].

Both Faust and War Nerd realize that war is a force that gives us meaning.

The Marshall Plan as a model

From Economic Principals,

“The Marshall Plan would be a good model — “maybe the only model”– for the looming “collective division of assets and liabilities” required to address global warming, according to social scientist Thomas Schelling.”

Previous post about Thomas Schelling here. Video of his 2005 Nobel Prize lecture here.

Science writers: two of the best

Edward O. Wilson and Steven Pinker are excellent science writers. Both are arguably better science writers than scientists. E.O. Wilson’s work on insects was really good, but his sociobiological ideas are less original than the ideas of e.g. Bill Hamilton or Bob Trivers (a talk by Trivers here). Steven Pinker’s ideas can be summarized as Chomsky plus Tooby & Cosmides; he stands on their shoulders but it it not clear that he sees a whole lot further than they did.

As writers both Wilson and Pinker are prolific, clear, readable, and mostly right. Their books are widely read. Those are great accomplishments.

The person who has done more than anybody else for building the market for science writing is John Brockman, who is a very successful literary agent. He correctly describes himself as an impresario. By creating hype and hoopla around a bunch of nerdish scientists he has promoted the public understanding of science and provided a real public service (see his Edge website, profile in The Guardian (pdf)).

Dani Rodrik on globalization

That excellent economist, Dani Rodrik, says “I am the creation of import substitution”. Read here.

Rival and nonrival goods

The history of an idea. Very nice article by David Warsh,

The rival/nonrival distinction apparently was introduced by Harvard University economist Richard Musgrave in the course of a wonderful conference in Biarritz, on the Basque coast of France, in 1966.

For a graphic illustration, see here.

Finance Student’s Toolkit

My recommendations for books, calculators, software on this page.

B-school teaching companies

On Organizations and Markets Peter Klein asks, should business schools should be like medical schools? Fabio Rojas on orgtheory.net suggest using the medical school as a model. He is right, but let us take it a step further. Medical schools have teaching hospitals. Let us have teaching companies in business schools. There are already student run coops and newspapers in many universities.

The advantages of teaching companies are several. You could increase the length of the MBA program and make it partially or optionally work-study, and therefore more affordable. You could recruit younger students with less previous work experience, and therefore with lower opportunity costs of studying. You could encourage faculty members to practice what they preach. There is nothing like profit-and-loss responsibility to reconnect you to the real world. And who knows? You might even make some money.

New Executive Masters in Finance

We have printed the brochures (they look good) and the website is up (looks less good, but we are working on it). The program is designed for European working professionals and CFA candidates. The program is structured around residential sessions of one to three weeks’ duration over 17 months in various locations in Europe. It will start in July 2007. It is a joint program between Erasmus University of Rotterdam and CERAM Sophia Antipolis. CERAM is located near Nice in the South of France. Both Rotterdam and Nice can easily be reached with low-cost airlines.

B-School Blues

Business schools have problems. In their search for academic respectability they have modelled themselves on the social sciences, and not on for example law and medical schools. There are virtually no practitioners teaching in business schools.

Richard Schmalensee, Dean of MIT’s Sloan School of Management writes about the incentive structure in academia in Business Week,

Where’s The “B” In B-Schools?
To our critics, including many successful managers, business schools have become little more than exercises in ticket punching for would-be consultants, taught by faculty who are more interested in impressing their academic colleagues than in confronting real-world business problems.

International Political Economy Society

First annual meeting of the IPES. Papers can be downloaded here. A paper by Michael J. Lamla confirms the Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis.