Junior job market

The junior job market in economics is gearing up for 2008-09. There has been a flood of practice job talks this past month at Michigan and I have started the process of writing the seven (!) letters for students on the job market that I have to write. Our placement meeting, at which the department faculty discuss and then rank the students into a set of categories is coming up fairly soon. It is the rankings from this meeting that determine what names get shared with employers who call us and ask who they should look at. A lot of the game is right here: on the demand side we basically do not look at anyone who is not recommended to us via the similar semi-orders constructed at other departments, unless there are very powerful back channel signals.

Here is a website where rumors (or even actual information) can be shared.

There was a similar (though less well laid out) site last year that I looked at a bit (and that some of our gradual students looked at a lot). I would caution students reading the site to watch out for deliberate misinformation and other nastiness. There was some of this last year in relation to a student of mine.