Braden University

Dear Members of the Admissions Committee,

I write in the strongest possible terms to recommend Jonathan Pierce for admission to your doctoral program in Economics. Jonathan took two of my courses — intermediate microeconomics and my advanced seminar in econometrics — and served as my research assistant for eighteen months. In a decade of teaching, he is among the top five students I have had the privilege to mentor.

Jonathan possesses the rarest quality in a young economist: he is genuinely original. For his senior thesis he assembled a novel panel dataset on regional labor mobility and applied an identification strategy I had not seen an undergraduate attempt — and he executed it cleanly. The resulting paper won our department's Whitcomb Prize for best thesis, and a revised version is now under review at a field journal with him as first author.

As a research assistant, Jonathan was meticulous, independent, and intellectually fearless — equally comfortable debugging a stubborn estimation routine and pushing back, respectfully, on my own assumptions. He graduates summa cum laude with a 3.94 GPA, but it is his maturity as a researcher that distinguishes him most. He is ready for doctoral work today.

I recommend Jonathan Pierce without hesitation and with my highest enthusiasm, and I am confident he will make a real contribution to the field. Please do not hesitate to contact me should you wish to discuss his candidacy in greater detail.