Courses for MA and PhD Students

At Teachers College, I teach the following core courses to MA and PhD students.

For MAs:

• In the fall, I teach Microeconomic Theory with Applications to Education, an advanced intermediate micro course for Master's students with a focus on the link between microeconomics and education. We use the Microeconomics textbook from Goolsbee, Levitt, and Syverson as our main text.

• In the spring, I teach Education and Economic Development. A draft syllabus is available here.

For PhDs:

• I teach the research seminar (see the “seminar” link at the top of this page).

• I occasionally teach “Education and Economic Development: Advanced Topics” at the PhD level. The syllabus from Spring 2021 is here.

If you’re a PhD Student who wants input from me

NOTE: I lifted this almost word-for-word from Chris Blattman's site, but the rules are great ones. Thanks Cblatts!

New PhD applicants:

I often get emails asking for advice or meetings during applications. Since there are so many of them, I generally can’t meet these requests. See my advice page where I've condensed everything I would say in person if I had infinite time and energy.

Current PhD students:

I am always happy to talk to Columbia and visiting PhDs student about their work, regardless of field. Please email or sign up for office hours online to discuss. New students should feel free to come by just to chat generally, especially first year PhDs. The stuff below applies mainly to regular visitors and advisees.

Before coming to see me for the first time, look at the advice page first, as it'll save us all time and that way you can make the most of your meeting.

General suggestions (and this is likely true for your meetings with other advisors too!)

• Regular meetings:

  • Send concise written updates (a couple of paragraphs or pages by email) a day or two before meeting. I think much more clearly when given some lead time.

  • Bring figures/tables to our meetings to discuss – this makes it way, way easier to talk about the ideas

  • If you're going to be my student, you should expect to prepare/have one of these meetings at least once per month

• Advance notice: give me advance notice if you want me to read or write something, specifically

  • 1-2 days for a quick and dirty (<2 pages) summary of research

  • At least a week for a paper or memo

  • At least two weeks for a recommendation/reference letter

  • NOTE: when you send me a PDF to read, make sure it is double spaced and has wide margins for making notes on.

• Reminders:

  • If you haven't heard from me by the time I said I would do something, email me to remind me. I'm imperfect and like most faculty, have way too many things going on.

  • Ditto for cases when (not if, sadly) I haven’t responded to an email in 48 hours; that means I've forgotten.