HBS PhD Programs

Graduate School Business School - MBA
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<p>Hello all,</p>

<p>I am about to graduate from a top 3 liberal arts college with a major in economics. My GPA is likely to be ~3.77/4.0. My economics thesis got nominated for magna cum laude (though I will not find out if I am in the top 25% of my class to get the magna degree until next week).</p>

<p>Anyways, I am trying to qualitatively plan out my future and was wondering what HBS (or other top business schools) look for in doctoral candidates.</p>

<p>This summer I am going to be working as a research assistant for a prestigious economic historian in California and reworking my thesis in the hopes of getting it published. I have no taken enough math classes, so I am going to spend the next year working with that professor and taking analysis and statistics at UCSD or UC Irvine. </p>

<p>To summarize my question:</p>

<p>Assume I have a magna degree and was barely top 25% of my class at a top liberal arts college. If i get my name on one or two published economics papers and increase my mathematical preparedness will my PhD program application be appealing to a top business school if i submitted that application in Fall 2011?</p>

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<p>The very first thing you have to ask yourself is why you really want to obtain a PhD in any subject, including what specifically you plan to do afterwards. Suffice it to say that a PhD program in a social science at a top school such as Harvard is designed to place graduates into academia, with perhaps a minor contingent heading for governmental policy/regulatory positions such as the Federal Reserve. If those careers are not of interest to you, then you’re probably better off doing something else rather than a PhD, for without the desire to garner those types of jobs, you run the significant risk of not even graduating at all - lots of Harvard PhD students never finish the degree - and even if you do, the social pressures within the program to conform to those jobs will mean years of lonely existence. </p>

<p>Given that you do want an economics PhD, the next question to ask yourself is why exactly you want to pursue such a degree at a business school rather than a pure economics department - not only why your work fits within the business school environment, but more importantly, why that environment fits you. While you haven’t stated what your research interests are, if you plan to pursue the aforementioned economic history project further, you are almost certainly better off doing so in a pure economics program, as very few business schools have a strong economic history contingent. Business schools are interested in specific sub-branches of economics, and if you don’t care about those branches, then you would be better off not being there. I am increasingly convinced that many HBS business economics PhD students - which is the HBS joint economics program - would have been far better off in other programs, such as the pure economics program or perhaps one of the KSG programs. Generally speaking, it is better to avoid joint programs such as the HBS bus-ec program without an excellent reason, as joint programs impose more requirements that may prove difficult to fulfill. For example, the bus-ec PhD students must have at least one committee advisor come from the business school and another from the pure economics department, whereas the economics PhD students only need to have one advisor from the economics department and the others can be from anywhere at Harvard, or even another school entirely such as MIT or BU. </p>

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<p>That depends on the quality of the journals. Frankly speaking, as an undergrad, your chances of authorship of a paper at a top journal are very low simply due to the exceedingly high selectivity of those journals; there are junior economics faculty at top schools such as Harvard and MIT who still have zero publications in any journals, much less a top journal(!). {As a case in point, Gregory Lewis, who placed in the Harvard economics department in 2007, still has zero publications. Not even one. Eric Chaney, who placed in 2008, has only one publication in a lower-level journal.} </p>

<p>Now obviously if you happen to be one of the tiny handful of undergrads who can obtain authorship credit in an A-level economics journal, then your application will be vastly enhanced. I simply wouldn’t hold my breath, when even many faculty at the top schools lack such publications.</p>

<p>On the other hand, authorship credit in a low-level journal won’t help you much. Many such journals exist, most with low publication standards, and their perceived value within the academic community is therefore minimal. I suspect they’re actually worse than having no publications at all, because of the option value: an unpublished working paper might still someday be published in a top journal after sufficient editing, but one that is published in a low-level journal can never be republished in a top one. </p>

<p>The bottom line then is, more important than having published papers in low-level journals is to have unpublished but intriguing working papers that you can leverage as an admissions fillip. You will inevitably be asked what your research interests are, and that’s when you can start talking about your working papers and how they might somebody be converted into A-level publications.</p>

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<p>Thanks for the informative reply, sakky. The economic history project is basically a historical industrial organization project: It is the IO aspect that particularly interests me. A PhD in business economics interests me (i think…again, part of the reason I am asking for advice is to hone in on the answer of what i want to do with my future) because it will allow me to study business strategy using the empirical methods of economics. I would like to understand econometrics at a high level and use it as such in my research. Now, of course I will have to confirm these interests over the next two years: While I LOVED my Industrial Organization course, it was not empirical.</p>

<p>I would like to know more about the journal aspect. I assume that there must be a set of second-tier journals that would still look good on my resume, even if they are not field leaders. My senior thesis was a behavioral economics experiment. While I have no idea if, with a lot of work, it could make it into an A-level journal, I would like to think that with the help of my advisors and various faculty members at my school I can create an interesting article. I know that I didn’t give you very much information about myself, and thus your response was relatively general, but I find it surprising (even if it may be true) that keeping a revamped version of my senior thesis in manuscript form would be a good idea (maybe I simply place some value in closure :slight_smile: ).</p>

<p>One more thing is the question of post-PhD jobs. At this point I don’t know if I want to be a Professor at the end of the day. I have a feeling that if I AM a professor, I would also like to be involved in an <em>actual</em> business. I understand that there is a large divide between business theory and business practice; Is it possible to flirt with both sides of that divide? One reason I would like to pursue a degree at a Business School is so that I have the opportunity to take some management classes and network with MBA students. Is this a naive aspiration?</p>

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<p>Well, the fact of the matter is that few people are actively pursuing empirical IO, or, more accurately, few are actually publishing empirical IO in A-level journals, a peculiarity noted by a number of observers (see Angrist & Pischke 2010, Ashenfelter, Hosken, and Weinberg 2009). Whether that’s because those researchers who do are simply unable to meet the publication standards dictated by the A-level journals, or because those journals are simply not interested in empirical IO is unclear. I suspect it is the latter, but it’s difficult to say. </p>

<p>What that means is that if you pursue empirical IO, you will suffer from a lonely existence, as you won’t have a vibrant community of actively publishing scholars with which to collaborate, and you may find it difficult to fill your committee with faculty who actually care about your work. On the other hand, you might find that to be beneficial, because it will also mean that you won’t have much difficulty in keeping pace with your literature nor will you have to greatly fear that next month’s journals will feature a paper regarding precisely what you were trying to research, because so few new papers in your field are ever published anyway.</p>

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<p>Generally speaking, if you truly don’t know if your working paper will ever become A-level material, then you should probably assume that it might, and hence, not publish in a B-level journal. You should only convert a working paper to a B-level publication if you are truly convinced that it will never become an A-level publication. </p>

<p>Besides, I see no reason for an undergraduate to convert any of his work to B-level publications, for an undergraduate has no career pressures to do so. In contrast, I can certainly understand why a junior faculty member whose tenure clock is close to expiration would convert all of his working papers to B-level publications rather than undergo tenure review having no publications whatsoever. However, given that A-level publications are worth exponentially more than B-level publications, as long as a chance exists to obtain an A-level, and you still have extensive time on the clock, conversion is probably unwise. Furthermore, you should feel no pressure from the admissions process, as only a tiny fraction of incoming PhD students at even the top programs have any publications, even B-levels. </p>

<p>Regarding what the B-level publications may be, that’s specific to the subfield in question, and as I am not a behavioral economist, I don’t really know (this is something to ask your faculty). What I will say is that B-level publications vary from school to school, such that what one school might consider to be B-level, another will consider to be C-level. {In contrast, there is widespread consensus regarding what the A-level journals are.} </p>

<p>However, certainly there is little value in publishing in a C-level (or worse) journal. If anything, such publications will hurt you, in that they send the negative signal to the market that you are incapable of ever publishing in an A-level journal. {Which leads too the interesting quirk of scholars disavowing their C-level publications by not listing them on their CV and never talking about them. But I digress.}</p>

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<p>To be honest, this paragraph raises serious alarm bells. If you don’t really know that you want to be in academia, or engage in academic-related policy work as in the Federal Reserve or similar venues, then, frankly, you probably shouldn’t pursue a PhD in economics (or management). That is what those programs are geared to producing, and if you’re not really sure that that’s what you want, then you may not have the drive to even complete the program at all (and many don’t, especially at schools such as Harvard). This is particularly because you specifically said that you want to be involved in actual business, which is extremely difficult to do as a PhD student, and even harder as a junior faculty member (assuming you make it that far). The (sad) truth is, you’re not going to be judged on how well connected you are to practical business, rather, you will be judged on how strong your theoretical work is. {And, yes, there are plenty of faculty even at business schools who aren’t connected to business practice and don’t care: see Pfeffer & Fong 2002.} </p>

<p>Personally, I would say that something like strategy consulting, followed by an MBA, would be more to your liking. Consultants can be theoretical and systemic, but are also deeply connected to practice. Consulting might something you could try for a few years to see if you want to remain or whether you now actually want to be in academia. Many of the PhD students at the top schools were former consultants.</p>