In the May 2006 American Economic Review (Papers and Proceedings from AEA annual conference) there's an article about attrition in Economics PhD programs (see outline here). What caught my eye was they had the average GRE scores for the top 48 phd programs, and the average GRE Quantitative score was a 775, and average verbal of 568. Considering most of the students were not US citizens, much of the verbal score was probably biased downward due to lack of familiarity with English. Nontheless, I found a GRE to IQ translator here, and this suggests--conservatively because they equally weight the Quantitative and Verbal scores--an average IQ of around 139, or the 99.4 percentile.

There wasn't a big difference between the top 15 schools that dominate research and the rest (4 IQ points or so), though there wasn't much data on schools ranked lowed than 48th place. Kind of scary, when you think about all the dumb stuff that goes on in these places. But I think it explains why economics research about the underclass is so lousy: they have no clue how a person with an 85 IQ thinks or behaves, and are too egalitarian to assume they think differently.

As my MBA friends would say, too bad we can't learn common sense (or how to dance, etc.)