Nicholas Bloom: observation

Transcript context

…So are the top five schools overrated for economics graduate study? I think the question to ask is, what’s the value added? Remember, the top five schools recruit, by far, the best students. I know Stanford ranks the students. We often make offers to those at the top of the list, and we do pretty well at that. We typically get picked by MIT. The question is, what’s the value added? It’s never been obvious to me what that is. I suspect it’s positive, but I’m not certain. It’s definitely not uniformly positive. For me, almost certainly, I was better off having gone to UCL. It was a fantastic outcome for me versus anywhere else because I got to work with these people early on. I also have to say I’m very lucky because the IFS in that era was big into what they called micro econometrics, which is basically using panel data, which turned out to be exactly the way to go. So I was clearly fortunate. I just happened to be in a university when it was on the rise at the time. You began your career at the British Institute for Fiscal Studies. How did that shape your subsequent research and how you think? Was that a mistake? Was that a wonderful start to have? It’s, again, highly unusual. Yes?…

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