Saturday, November 13, 2010

Job market signal

The American Economic Association allows newly minted (or almost minted, in most cases) doctorates to send an explicit signal of extra bonus interest to two of the (usually 100-150) schools / governmental or quasi-governmental institutions / firms to which they have applied.

As I sometimes get emails from students asking about strategy, here it is: send your signals to places that you would like to go to for some reason that would not be observable to them based on your job market packet: e.g., your favorite cousins live nearby, you've always been a Packers fan ever since you first saw the cheese hats, etc. In terms of quality, I would pick places for this purpose that are around your expected placement level.

Here is a deeper, and longer, discussion from Greg Mankiw's blog a couple of years ago.

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