Redesigning the Economics major(s) at Stanford

 At many universities, the undergraduate major in Economics serves several distinct groups of students.  There are students who might want to go on to graduate work in economics, students seeking jobs in business or government or NGOs that require analytical skills, students who would have chosen a Business major if one were available, and students who want to be capable of understanding articles in the WSJ and being thoughtful about public policy.  In general, departments have adopted the view that an education in econ is good for all these groups, from future economists to future educated citizens.

But not all of those groups are equally well served by the same set of required courses.  So Stanford is now offering two different undergrad degrees in Economics.

 Stanford Report has the story

"Economics major expanded to better suit different career paths.
In addition to a Bachelor of Arts degree, the Department of Economics now offers a Bachelor of Science and certificates in several subfields."

 "The Department of Economics in the School of Humanities and Sciences has begun offering students the option of pursuing a Bachelor of Science degree, and the Bachelor of Arts program has been modified. Also, majors can now fine-tune their interests by pursuing certificates in business economics, environmental economics, data science, and finance.  

"One of the most popular majors at Stanford, economics serves a range of students, from those seeking social science insights into decision-making to those seeking specialized quantitative – or “quant” – skills for numbers-heavy careers in finance.

...

“We don’t need them to get through MATH 51 unless they are going in the direction of the more ‘quant’ jobs – in which case we actually want them to have more math,” said Bernheim, who is also director of undergraduate studies in the department. “We decided we could serve both groups better by changing the prerequisite for the BA degree.” 

"Consequently, the new BS pathway’s core requirements, which are more quantitative than the BA’s, include MATH 115: Functions of a Real Variable; STATS 117: Theory of Probability; CS 106B: Programming Abstractions; and math-intensive economics courses on topics such as econometrics and game theory.

...

"Students on either degree path also can now obtain certificates in four areas: business economics, data science, environmental economics, and finance. The certificates allow students to narrow their focus within the major and signal to prospective employers that they’ve learned specific skill sets."

Journal of Comments and Replications in Economics invites papers from Ph.D. students

I recently received this email, inviting papers from PhD students:

"I am writing you as Editor of the Journal of Comments and Replications in Economics (JCRE). JCRE is an online journal published by the German National Library of Economics (ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics). It is an open access journal with no article processing charges. Our Advisory Board includes David Autor, Anna Dreber, Richard Easterlin, Edward Leamer, David Roodman, and Jeffrey Wooldridge.

We are recruiting replication submissions from PhD students at top universities. With the end of the semester upon us, I am asking if you might be aware of any students who have done replications, either in your course or in the courses of your colleagues. If so, the Christmas break could be a great time to encourage them to prepare their replication research for submission to a journal.

We believe JCRE could be an attractive outlet for graduate students’ replication research. Our quick turnaround time and online publishing model provides an opportunity to achieve a peer-reviewed journal publication quickly. Perhaps in time for next year’s job market.

The philosophy of JCRE is that replications are essential to assess the reliability of economics research. While some top journals publish replications, it is still difficult for most replications to get published in a peer-reviewed journal. JCRE provides a home for these studies.

We are asking your help to circulate this opportunity to any students or colleagues who might be interested. The attached flyer may be helpful in this regard

Thank you for your help. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the journal at jcre@zbw-online.eu."

What preferences are revealed by market designs? by Oğuzhan Çelebi (who is on the job market)

Oğuzhan Çelebi is on the job market this year (listed on the job market websites of both MIT and Stanford where he's finishing a two year postdoc). He has a new paper that takes a really novel approach to market design.  It looks at the implicit preference relation (if one exists) that a mechanism reveals when a revealed preference analysis is done of the choices it makes from different possible menus of alternatives. The specific focus is on preferences for diversity revealed by mechanisms used in connection with affirmative action.

Diversity Preferences and Affirmative Action, by Oğuzhan Çelebi 

Abstract: "In various contexts, institutions allocate resources using rules that determine selections given the set of candidates. Many of these rules feature affirmative action, accounting for both identity and (match) quality of individuals. This paper studies the relationship between these rules and the preferences underlying them. I map the standard setting of market design to the revealed preference framework, interpreting choice rules as observed choices made across different situations. I provide a condition that characterizes when a rule can be rationalized by preferences based on identities and qualities. I apply tests based on this condition to evaluate real-world mechanisms, including India’s main affirmative action policy for allocating government jobs, and find that it cannot be rationalized. When identities are multidimensional, I show that non-intersectional views of diversity can be exploited by dominant groups to increase their representation and cause the choice rules to violate the substitutes condition, a key requirement for the use of stable matching mechanisms. I also characterize rules that can be rationalized by preferences separable in diversity and quality, demonstrating that they lead to a unique selection within the broader set of policies that reserve places based on individuals’ identities."

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He's a target of opportunity for any department interested in market design.

Practical market design makes policy recommendations (which can violate NBER publication policy)

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) publishes a widely read series of working papers, before publication in refereed journals. They also distribute a list of papers that have been published in medical journals, since those journals don't allow prepublication in working papers.  For both these series the NBER has a rule against papers that make policy recommendations.

This is sometimes a problem for the field of market design, since practical market design is about finding ways to improve the operation of markets, which is a kind of policy advice. I encountered this recently with the two papers described below, published in medical journals, which apparently are too policy related: the policy being to save more lives by arranging more transplants, in this case of hearts and kidneys respectively. (Medical journals have their own conventions, but aren't opposed to advice on medical practice...)

I received the following email from the NBER, accompanied by a line of explanation for each paper.

The email began:

"I apologize for my belated response about your journal articles; while the subject matter is clearly vital, after review of the full-text, we determined that your articles make policy recommendations that are too specific for NBER’s policy on working papers (which we apply to papers in the article list)."

 It then continued by highlighting the offending sentences in each article:

1. Alyssa Power MD*, Kurt R. Sweat MA*, Alvin Roth PhD, John C. Dykes MD, Beth Kaufman MD, Michael Ma MD, Sharon Chen MD, MPH, Seth A. Hollander MD, Elizabeth Profita MD, David N Rosenthal MD, Lynsey Barkoff NP, Chiu-Yu Chen MD PhD, Ryan R. Davies MD, Christopher S. Almond MD, MPH, “Contemporary Pediatric Heart Transplant Waitlist Mortality,” Journal of the American College of Cardiology, Vol 84, no. 7, August 13, 2024: 620-632.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0735109724075624

"Policy language:  A more flexible allocation system that accurately reflects patient-specific risks and considers transplant benefit is urgently needed."

2. Vivek B. Kute, Himanshu V Patel, Subho Banerjee,Divyesh P Engineer, Ruchir B Dave, Nauka Shah, Sanshriti Chauhan ,Harishankar Meshram , Priyash Tambi  , Akash Shah, Khushboo Saxena,Manish Balwani , Vishal Parmar, Shivam Shah, Ved Prakash ,Sudeep Patel, Dev Patel, Sudeep Desai, Jamal Rizvi , Harsh Patel, Beena Parikh, Kamal Kanodia, Shruti Gandhi, Michael A Rees,  Alvin E Roth,  Pranjal Modi “Impact of single centre kidney-exchange transplantation to increase living donor pool in India: A cohort study involving non-anonymous allocation,”Nephrology, September 2024,https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nep.14380

"Policy language: We suggest stepwise progress to achieve multicentre, regional, State and then a National program. Ideally, there should be engagement by the National Organ & Tissue Transplant Organization and the World Health Organization. 

While we recommend simultaneous surgery for mDRPs in a single exchange, sometimes logistical aspects have necessitated non-simultaneous exchanges"

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Earlier posts:

Thursday, August 8, 2024  Pediatric Heart Transplants: rethinking the waitlist, by Power, Sweat...Almond et al.

 Wednesday, September 18, 2024 More on non-anonymous kidney exchange in India

Job market for Economics Ph.D.s: 2024 versus the past 5 years

 Here's a scary story for Halloween: the job market for new Econ PhDs is off to a somewhat slow start: in the figures below, see the bright blue line of positions for 2024 to date.  There's still room to grow (as indeed we've seen in previous years).  And we're way ahead of 2020, the deep Covid year.

To: Members of the American Economic Association
From: AEA Committee on the Job Market:  John Cawley (chair), Elisabeth “Bitsy” Perlman, Al Roth, Peter Rousseau, Wendy Stock, and Stephen Wu
Date: October 30, 2024
Re: JOE job openings by sector, 2024 versus the past 5 years

"This memo reports the cumulative number of unique job openings on Job Openings for Economists (JOE), by sector and week, compared to the same week in recent years."