Tag Archives: writing

I’ve read a lot of personal statements for PhD applications. I sat on admissions at UChicago, Columbia, and Yale, mostly in economics, political science, and public policy. Here’s the advice I’ve given my own students and research assistants to craft their statements. I give it because, sadly, I don’t find most statements helpful. This means they are not helping you, the applicant. As with all my advice posts, it’s important that students outside elite colleges get this information, so here...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Good links from David McKenzie this week (as always), including this one from CSWEP on mentoring underrepresented minority women in economics.As much as it pains me to link to both David *and* my other Friday links competitor, Tim Ogden of NYU’s faiV, (which focuses on financial inclusion) he’s got a really good piece on CGAP’s blog. It’s ostensibly on what can we expect to learn from financial inclusion research, but really...

World Bank Chief Economist Paul Romer is giving up some of his management duties, in part due to frictions over trying to get researchers to communicate better, pressuring them to create shorter presentations and use fewer run-on sentences (like this one). Bloomberg and FT’s reports seem gossipy and read like only part of the story. Romer has responded with a post on his personal blog, and offered a public mirror of the internal blog he uses to communicate with World Bank staff. Taking on...

By James Kwak Today, you may be getting your copy of Economism: Bad Economics and the Rise of Inequality in the mail. Or you may even be able to buy it in a bookstore. But before you crack it open, I want to tell you something. I hate typos. I try to read each of my book manuscripts carefully before submitting them. I hire my own line editor to go through my writing for grammatical and stylistic errors. The publisher then does a copy edit. When I get the “galleys” back from the...