Demographic Differences in Letters of Recommendation for Economics Ph.D. Students
Beverly Hirtle and
Anna Kovner
Additional contact information
Anna Kovner: https://www.richmondfed.org/research/people/kovner
No 1129, Staff Reports from Federal Reserve Bank of New York
Abstract:
We analyze 6,400 letters of recommendation for more than 2,200 economics and finance Ph.D. graduates from 2018 to 2021. Letter text varies significantly by field of interest, with significantly less positive and shorter letters for Macroeconomics and Finance candidates. Letters for female and Black or Hispanic job candidates are weaker in some dimensions, while letters for Asian candidates are notably less positive overall. We introduce a new measure of letter quality capturing candidates that are recommended to “top” departments. Female, Asian, and Black or Hispanic candidates are all less likely to be recommended to top academic departments, even after controlling for other letter characteristics. Finally, we examine early career outcomes and find that letter characteristics, especially a “top” recommendation have meaningful effects on initial job placements and journal publications.
Keywords: recommendation letters; gender in economics; Race and ethnicity; research institutions; professional labor markets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A11 A23 J15 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 47
Date: 2024-10-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab, nep-sea and nep-sog
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/sr1129.pdf Full text (application/pdf)
https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr1129.html Summary (text/html)
Related works:
Working Paper: Demographic Differences in Letters of Recommendation for Economics Ph.D. Students (2024) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fednsr:98958
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
DOI: 10.59576/sr.1129
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Staff Reports from Federal Reserve Bank of New York Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gabriella Bucciarelli ().