The NBER celebrates market design

 From the NBER Reporter:

Working Group Report: Market Design  By Michael Ostrovsky and Parag A. Pathak

Here are the introductory paragraphs (after which the report goes on to survey various areas of market design research).

"The Market Design Working Group, established in 2009 under the leadership of Susan Athey and Parag Pathak, is a preeminent research forum in the field of market design. The working group meets annually, alternating between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Palo Alto, California, to present research that bridges theoretical economics and practical applications, all focused on what The Economist aptly characterized as “an intelligently designed invisible hand.”1 Research in market design has been celebrated in academic circles, as evidenced by recognitions like the 2012 Nobel Prize for work on matching markets and the 2020 Nobel Prize for auction theory, and has also been instrumental in catalyzing tangible reforms in real-world institutions and markets.

"One feature that sets market design apart from much of traditional economic theory is its unwavering commitment to practical applications. Market designers have developed a unique professional profile, equally at home in university lecture halls, hospital surgery wards, school committee meetings, and the boardrooms of technology companies. This versatility allows them to translate complex economic models and analyses into solutions for real-world problems. The field’s research has informed an impressive range of applications across various sectors of society. "

Specialized recycling--when guts are in short supply.

 Guts are in short supply these days.  Fortunately they can be recycled.

Here's a photo from Half Moon Bay.

Anti trans leads to anti transplant in Indiana Senate

 In Indiana, the Daily Journal reports on a debate that has at least temporarily stalled a bill meant to protect organ donors' access to insurance.

Living organ donor bill sparks emotional discussion in the Senate
By TheStatehouseFile.com -January 27, 2025 

"During Thursday afternoon’s Senate hearing, 10 bills were brought up for their final vote before moving to the House of Representatives. While nine of the bills passed without discussion, one of the bills, SB 111, which would, among other provisions, protect organ donors from being denied coverage by insurance companies, sparked debate

...

"Sen. Andrea Hunley, D-Indianapolis, who authored the bill with Sen. Scott Baldwin, R-Noblesville, and Sen. Kyle Walker, R-Lawrence, began the discussion by describing the necessity of protecting Hoosier organ donors. She was then questioned by Sen. Liz Brown, R-Fort Wayne.

“My concern is that if a trans woman wanted a uterine transplant, that would be covered under the bill,” said Brown.

"Brown, who mentioned her concern about uterine transplants repeatedly during the discussion, was also concerned about possible raises in insurance rates for Hoosiers."

HT: Martha Gershun

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The uterus is just a muscle, so some transplant surgeons  I've talked to think such a transplant could be done.  The pregnancy would start with IVF, and the delivery would be by C-section…

 

Presidential memo shuts down all government grants (now including NSF)

 A Presidential memo issued yesterday is shutting down all government grants, including e.g. those from the NSF.  

Here's the memo:

MEMORANDUM FOR HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES
FROM: Matthew J. Vaeth, Acting Director, Office of Management and Budget
SUBJECT: Temporary Pause of Agency Grant, Loan, and Other Financial Assistance Programs 

" The use of Federal resources to advance  Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of  taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve. "

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Here's the story from NPR:

National Science Foundation freezes grant review in response to Trump executive orders, By Jonathan Lambert January 27, 2025 

"The National Science Foundation canceled all of its grant review panels this week, as the organization works to align its grantmaking process with new executive orders from the Trump administration. 

...

"More than 60 of those meetings were scheduled for this week, all of which were abruptly canceled Monday morning."

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And here's a broader view from the Washington Post:

White House pauses all federal grants, sparking confusion. Trillions of dollars could be on hold, according to an Office of Management and Budget memo. By Jeff Stein, Jacob Bogage and Emily Davies, January 27, 2025

 "The White House budget office is ordering a pause to all grants and loans disbursed by the federal government, according to an internal memo sent to agencies Monday, creating significant confusion across Washington.

"In a two-page document, Matthew J. Vaeth, the acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, instructs federal agencies to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligations or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance.” The memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, also calls for each agency to perform a “comprehensive analysis” to ensure its grant and loan programs are consistent with President Donald Trump’s executive orders, which aimed to ban federal diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and limit clean energy spending, among other measures.

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And here's the view from Science:

Trump’s shutdown of federal diversity office at NSF breaks law that created it. CHIPS and Science Act established position to broaden participation in science  ByJeffrey Mervis

"President Donald Trump’s order yesterday shutting down diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices was part of a slew of presidential directives from the new administration that apply to every federal agency. But for the National Science Foundation (NSF), following the White House’s order required it to ignore a mandate from Congress, and the lawmakers behind it are ticked off.

“Trump’s dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts across the federal government is just plain wrong,” said the top Democrat on the House of Representatives’s science committee, Representative Zoe Lofgren (CA). “For years, the committee has been working in a bipartisan effort to create a STEM workforce that more accurately represents the rich diversity and intellectual capacity of our nation. Trump has made hypocrites of the Republicans who joined us in spearheading diversity and equity efforts.”

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   "First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
    "Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
    "Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
    "Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."

    —Martin Niemöller
 

Derek Humphry, Pivotal Figure in Right-to-Die Movement, (1930-2025)

 Here's the NYT obit:

Derek Humphry, Pivotal Figure in Right-to-Die Movement, Dies at 94
His own experience assisting his terminally ill wife in ending her life set him on a path to founding the Hemlock Society and writing a best-selling guide.  By Michael S. Rosenwald, NYT,  Jan. 24, 2025

"Derek Humphry, a British-born journalist whose experience helping his terminally ill wife end her life led him to become a crusading pioneer in the right-to-die movement and to publish “Final Exit,” a best-selling guide to suicide, died on Jan. 2 in Eugene, Ore. He was 94.

His death, at a hospice facility, was announced by his family

...

"In August 1980, he and his [second] wife rented the Los Angeles Press Club to announce the establishment of the Hemlock Society, which they ran out of the garage of their home in Santa Monica.

"The organization grew quickly. In 1981, it issued “Let Me Die Before I Wake,” a guide to medicines and dosages for inducing “peaceful self-deliverance.” The group also lobbied state legislatures to enact laws making assisted suicide legal. In 1990, the Hemlock Society moved to Eugene. By then it had more than 30,000 members, but the right-to-die conversation hadn’t yet reached most dinner tables in America. 

"That changed spectacularly in 1991, after Mr. Humphry published “Final Exit: The Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying.” The book was a 192-page step-by-step guide that, in addition to explaining suicide methods, provided Miss Manners-like tips for exiting gracefully.

...

"“Final Exit” quickly shot to No. 1 in the hardcover advice category of The New York Times’s best-seller list.

“That is an indication of how large the issue of euthanasia looms in our society now,” the bioethicist Dr. Arthur Caplan told The Times in 1991. “It is frightening and disturbing, and that kind of sales figure is a shot across the bow. It is the loudest statement of protest of how medicine is dealing with terminal illness and dying.”

"Reactions to “Final Exit” were generally divided along ideological lines. Conservatives blasted it.

“What can one say about this new ‘book’? In one word: evil,” the University of Chicago bioethicist Leon R. Kass wrote in Commentary magazine, calling Mr. Humphry “the Lord High Executioner.”  

...

"But progressives embraced the book, even as public health experts expressed concern that the methods it laid out could be used by depressed people who weren’t terminally ill. "

Executive Order of the President suspending refugee admissions to the United States

 Here's the Executive Order of the President suspending refugee admissions to the United States.

 REALIGNING THE UNITED STATES REFUGEE ADMISSIONS PROGRAM: EXECUTIVE ORDER January 20, 2025
 "The United States lacks the ability to absorb large numbers of migrants, and in particular, refugees, into its communities in a manner that does not compromise the availability of resources for Americans, that protects their safety and security, and that ensures the appropriate assimilation of refugees.  This order suspends the USRAP until such time as the further entry into the United States of refugees aligns with the interests of the United States."

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 And here's an email I received yesterday from the HIAS, the refugee resettlement agency with which my wife and I have had a long relationship.

 "Yesterday afternoon, the U.S. government decided to abruptly suspend life-saving assistance to vulnerable people around the world. HIAS, along with many partner organizations who provide humanitarian and development assistance, was issued a Stop-Work Order for many of our programs that receive State Department funding.
 

"The magnitude of the Stop-Work Orders is unprecedented and breathtakingly cruel. All around the world, programs, including ours, that provide clean water, shelter, medical care, food, and other critical services will end, leaving millions of people abandoned to face exploitation, violence, and hunger.
 

"The grave impacts also extend into the United States. HIAS and our resettlement partners are prevented from providing critical services to refugees who were welcomed here through the resettlement program and have already legally begun their new lives. Coupled with the executive order halting all new refugee admissions, this is a total shutdown of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.

...

"As Jews and humanitarians, HIAS will never turn our backs on refugees, even if the U.S. government has. We have a responsibility to always stand up for newcomers, who came to the U.S. with the understanding that we would help them adjust to life in a new country. We will always stand up for the rights and safety of forcibly displaced people around the world.
HIAS has always been an organization that stands for welcome — and we will continue to do all we can.
 

In solidarity,

— HIAS

Informed consent and compensation for clinical trial participants (Ambuehl, Ockenfels and Stewart in REStat)

 Here's the latest in a series of papers that suggests that participants who are attracted to e.g. clinical trials by the pay may be those who have the most trouble evaluating the costs and risks. So high pay should be paired with robust procedures for informed consent.

Ambuehl, Sandro, Axel Ockenfels, and Colin Stewart. "Who opts in? Composition effects and disappointment from participation payments." Review of Economics and Statistics 107, no. 1 (2025): 78-94.

Abstract: "Participation payments are used in many transactions about which people know little but can learn more: incentives for medical trial participation, signing bonuses for job applicants, or price rebates on consumer durables. Who opts into the transaction when given such incentives? We theoretically and experimentally identify a composition effect whereby incentives disproportionately increase participation among those for whom learning is harder. Moreover, these individuals use less information to decide whether to participate, which makes disappointment more likely. The learning-based composition effect is stronger in settings in which information acquisition is more difficult. 

"we contribute to the burgeoning literature on the moral constraints on markets (Kahneman et al., 1986; Roth, 2007; Ambuehl et al., 2015; Ambuehl, 2022; Elias et al., 2019). Around the world, the principles of informed consent are fundamental to regulations concerning human research participation, as well as to transactions such as human egg donation, organ donation, and gestational surrogacy (DHEW 1978, The Belmont Report, 1978; Faden & Beauchamp, 1986). According to these principles, the decision to participate in a transaction is ethically sound if it is made not only voluntarily but also in light of all relevant information, properly comprehended.3 Our results show that payments for participation can be in conflict with participants’ understanding about the consequences of participation. They further show that the severity of this conflict grows with respect to both the amount of the payment and the difficulty of acquiring and processing information about the consequences of the transaction."

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Earlier:

Wednesday, September 4, 2024 Incentives matter for getting participation in clinical trials by low income households

 

Sunday, March 10, 2024 Does high pay equal "undue inducement"? An experiment by Sandro Ambuehl

 

 

New marriage laws, in Thailand and Iraq (allowing same sex marriage, and child marriage, respectively)

 Same-sex couples can now marry in Thailand, and children as young as nine can now be married in Iraq.

Thailand Celebrates New Same-Sex Marriage Law With Mass Wedding  Hundreds of people began registering their marriages at a mall in Bangkok, as Thailand became one of the few places in Asia to legalize same-sex unions.   By Richard C. Paddock and Muktita Suhartono

“Today we feel secure and safe and happy,” said Ploynaplus Chirasukon, 33, who wed her partner, Kwanporn Kongpetch, 32, in the event’s first marriage. “We are happy that we have played a part in the equal marriage law reaching this point.”

Other weddings were planned around the country, and organizers say they expect more than 1,000 same-sex couples to marry on the first day." 

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Here's the Guardian on Iraq:

‘The end of women and children’s rights’: outrage as Iraqi law allows child marriage. The Iraqi parliament has passed a ‘terrifying’ law permitting children as young as nine to marry by Maria Talal and Hala Abdulla

"Iraqi MPs and women’s rights groups have reacted with horror to the Iraqi parliament passing a law permitting children as young as nine years old to marry, with activists saying it will “legalise child rape”.

"Under the new law, which was agreed yesterday, religious authorities have been given the power to decide on family affairs, including marriage, divorce and the care of children. It abolishes a previous ban on the marriage of children under the age of 18 in place since the 1950s.

“We have reached the end of women’s rights and the end of children’s rights in Iraq,” said the lawyer Mohammed Juma, one of the most prominent opponents of the law."

Inputs to academic productivity, Part 2: Dissertation advisors (by Angrist and Diederichs)

  A new NBER working paper by Josh Angrist and Marc Diederichs looks at Ph.D. graduates of top Economics departments since 1994. The goal of the paper is to understand the advisor-student relationship, as part of the production function of producing top economists.  In an appendix (i.e. not the main point of the paper) they produce a long table ranking effective advisors, as measured by the success of their students.  I'm charmed to find that, through the magic of econometrics, they ranked me first.

A big part of my delight is that there are teachers up and down my family tree.  My parents, who were both high school teachers, would have been glad to see the table (and my mom would have believed in its accuracy and robustness to alternative specifications:)

 So, before I say more about the paper, here's the first page of their table (Table A2, p48-53, listing the first 180 advisors):

Now that we've gotten the important part out of the way, here's the paper:

DISSERTATION PATHS: ADVISORS AND STUDENTS IN THE ECONOMICS RESEARCH PRODUCTION FUNCTION by Joshua Angrist and Marc Diederichs, NBER Working Paper 33281, http://www.nber.org/papers/w33281 

Abstract: "Elite economics PhD programs aim to train graduate students for a lifetime of academic research. This paper asks how advising affects graduate students’ post-PhD research productivity. Advising is highly concentrated: at the eight highly-selective schools in our study, a minority of advisors do most of the advising work. We quantify advisor attributes such as an advisor’s own research output and aspects of the advising relationship like coauthoring and research field affinity that might contribute to student research success. Students advised by research-active, prolific advisors tend to publish more, while coauthoring has no effect. Student-advisor research affinity also predicts student success. But a school-level aggregate production function provides much weaker evidence of causal effects, suggesting that successful advisors attract students likely to succeed–without necessarily boosting their students’ chances of success. Evidence for causal effects is strongest for a measure of advisors’ own research output. Aggregate student research output appears to scale linearly with graduate student enrollment, with no evidence of negative class-size effects. An analysis of gender differences in research output shows male and female graduate students to be equally productive in the first few years post-PhD, but female productivity peaks sooner than male productivity. "

" Why do so few highly-selected elite program graduates follow the path to research success taken by their extraordinarily successful advisors? What aspects of economics advisee training might be
changed or enhanced so as to boost graduate student success and total research output?
These questions motivate our study of the economics PhD education production function at elite universities. The principal production inputs in this function are the faculty who teach and advise graduate students, along with aspects of the advising relationship that faculty and students develop together."

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Yesterday's post: Wednesday, January 22, 2025  Inputs to academic productivity, Part 1: Socioeconomic background (by Abramitzky et al.)

Another thought about Ph.D.s (and deciding whether to get one): Thursday, September 12, 2024 Should you get a Ph.D.?

and here are all my blog posts on students.