Letters of Recommendation in the PhD Job Market: Lessons from Specialized Banks (opens in new tab)

Banks must extract useful signals of a potential borrower's quality from a large set of possibly informative characteristics when making lending decisions. A model that speaks to how banks specialize in lending to an industry in order to better extract signals from data can potentially be applied to a number of real-world scenarios. In this post, we apply lessons from such a model to a topic of timely relevance in economics: job market recommendation letters. Institutions looking to hire new ...