Imperial Recommendation Letter Example: Gender budgeting researcher to fiscal equality policy (Score 92)

To the Admissions Committee MSc Economics and Finance, Imperial College Business School I am writing in support of the applicant's application to the MSc Economics and Finance programme. I supervised their undergraduate dissertation over approximately ten months, and I can speak directly to their analytical development, their capacity to work with quantitative methods under genuine research conditions, and their readiness for graduate-level study in economics and finance. The applicant came to me with a proposal to examine gender-responsive budgeting practices and their measurable effects on fiscal resource allocation. The topic sits at the intersection of public finance and gender policy — an area where the empirical literature is thinner than the policy rhetoric, and where a student has to make real methodological choices rather than follow a well-worn template. That context matters for what I observed. In our early supervision meetings, it became clear that the applicant had a strong intuitive grasp of the policy problem but had not yet developed the discipline to translate that intuition into a defensible empirical strategy. Their first draft of the methods chapter proposed a difference-in-differences design without adequately justifying the parallel trends assumption or addressing the limited number of treated units in the available panel. I pushed back directly on both points. What I found encouraging was not that they immediately produced a correct answer — they did not — but that they returned the following week having read three methodological papers I had not assigned, having drafted a revised identification section, and having written a short note explaining why one of those papers actually undermined the approach they had initially preferred. That kind of self-correcting engagement with critique is not common at undergraduate level, and it is what I remember most clearly from that period of the supervision. A second scene is worth describing because it shows a different dimension. During a departmental seminar in the spring term, the applicant attended a presentation on fiscal incidence analysis that was only loosely connected to their own project. Afterwards they raised a question about whether the decomposition method being presented could be adapted to budget-line data disaggregated by gender classification. The question was technically specific and contextually appropriate — it was not a student performing engagement, it was someone who had been thinking carefully about measurement problems in their own work and recognised a possible tool. The presenter, a visiting researcher, spent several minutes on the response. I noted it because it was unprompted and because it reflected genuine intellectual curiosity rather than thesis anxiety. I should be honest about one area where the applicant's work showed unevenness. Their treatment of the financial and macroeconomic dimensions of fiscal policy was less developed than their command of the public policy and distributional analysis literature. When the dissertation touched on sovereign budget constraints or the financing implications of expenditure reallocation, the analysis was competent but not as confident as it was in the policy-evaluation sections. This is a gap that a well-structured MSc programme in economics and finance is well placed to address, and I do not think it reflects a ceiling so much as a preparation asymmetry that the applicant is aware of. I raised it with them directly, and their response — to seek out additional reading in public finance theory before submitting the final draft — was characteristic of how they handled criticism throughout the project. The applicant submitted a dissertation that I assessed as a creditable piece of applied economics research. The empirical work was careful, the policy memo component was clearly written and analytically grounded, and the overall project demonstrated that they can sustain a research question over a long period without losing rigour. Imperial's MSc in Economics and Finance will demand stronger technical foundations in financial economics and quantitative methods than the applicant has yet been tested on at undergraduate level. I believe they have the analytical habits and the intellectual seriousness to meet that demand. I recommend them for admission. [Date]