Madhav Raghavan on transparency (and on the European job market)

Madhav Raghavan is completing a postdoc at the University of Lausanne this year (working with Bettina Klaus), and is on the job market, primarily in Europe.  I got to know him when he visited us briefly at Stanford this year (in person, before having to retreat back to Switzerland, as Covid surged...)

His job market paper concerns the verifiability of the algorithms that run centralized clearinghouses, and how that can be improved by changing the kinds of feedback that participants receive.

Transparency in Centralised Allocation: Theory and Experiment  by Rustamdjan Hakimov and Madhav Raghavan

Abstract: Many algorithmic allocation mechanisms suffer from a verifiability problem: participants cannot check if their assignments are correct. This problem is compounded if there are suspicions that the designer has deviated from the true allocation. We formalise these concerns and propose solutions in an information-based framework. A participant's assignment is `verifiable' by her if any other assignment contradicts her information. A stronger requirement is `transparency', where the designer cannot deviate from the true allocation without being detected. We show how the communication of `terminal-cutoffs' and the use of `predictable' multi-stage mechanisms each provide information to participants that verifies their assignments. Even though the information from predictable mechanisms and terminal-cutoffs can each be manipulated by a dishonest designer without detection, in our main result we show that they nevertheless achieve transparency if used together. We suggest transparent environments for use in school admissions, single-object auctions and house allocation. We support the effectiveness of our solutions via a school admissions laboratory experiment.

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The paper develops the theory in some generality, and also focuses on the particular case of the deferred acceptance algorithm, which is the subject of the experiment they report.  

If you're hiring, he's worth a close look.

Colin Sullivan on organ transplant policy (and on the job market this year)

 Colin Sullivan is completing a two-year postdoc at Stanford this year, and is on the job market.

His job market paper is an experiment with an exceptionally creative design. (Spoiler: it involves a cat actually getting a kidney transplant.) 

Eliciting Preferences Over Life And Death: Experimental Evidence From Organ Transplantation by Colin by D. Sullivan

Abstract: Optimal allocation of scarce, life-saving medical treatment depends on society’s preferences over survival distributions, governed by notions of equality and  efficiency.  In  a  novel  experiment,  I  elicit  preferences  over  survival  distributions in incentivized, life-or-death decisions. Subjects allocate an organ transplant among real cats with kidney failure. In each choice, subjects allocate a single organ based on the expected survival of each patient. The survival rates imply a price ratio, allowing me to infer the shape of indifference curves over survival bundles. I find that the vast majority (80%) of subjects respond to  increases  in  total  expected  survival  time,  while  a  small  minority  display Leontief preferences, providing the transplant to the shortest-lived patient at all  price  ratios.  Hypothetical  decisions  may  not  be  reliable  in  this  context: a large share (46%) of subjects allocate a hypothetical transplant differently than a real transplant, though estimates of aggregate preferences are the same across incentivized and unincentivized conditions. Finally, I show that aversion to wealth inequality is a good predictor of aversion to survival inequality.

(This human subjects research proto-col  was  approved  by  the  Stanford  University  Institutional  Review  Board  (IRB).  A discussion of ethical considerations in designing this protocol is included in Appendix A.)

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It's not his first really very creative experimental design: check out is 2019 paper in the AER: 

Incentivized Resume Rating: Eliciting Employer PreferencesWithout Deception (With Judd B. Kessler And Corinne Low)

American Economic Review, 2019, Vol. 109 (11): 3713-44. Online Appendix

Abstract: We introduce a new experimental paradigm to evaluate employer preferences, called Incentivized Resume Rating (IRR). Employers evaluate resumes they know to be hypothetical in order to be matched with real job seekers, preserving incentives while avoiding the deception necessary in audit studies. We deploy IRR with employers recruiting college seniors from a prestigious school, randomizing human capital characteristics and demographics of hypothetical candidates. We measure both employer preferences for candidates and employer beliefs about the likelihood candidates will accept job offers, avoiding a typical confound in audit studies. We discuss the costs, benefits, and future applications of this new methodology.

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My advice if you're hiring: check him out.

Akhil Vohra on unravelling (and on the job market this year)

Akhil Vohra, who will be finishing his Ph.D. in Economics at Stanford this year, has been thinking about unraveling for a long time.  His job market paper explores a novel channel by which markets can unravel in time, with early, inefficient hiring, even when talent isn't scarce.

Unraveling and Inefficient Matching by Akhil Vohra 

Job Market Paper, November 5, 2020

Abstract: Labor markets are said to unravel if the matches between workers and firms

occur inefficiently early, based on limited information. I argue that a significant determinant of unraveling is the transparency of the secondary market, where firms can poach workers employed by other firms. I propose a model of interviewing and hiring that allows firms to hire on the secondary market as well as at the entry level. Unraveling arises as a strategic decision by low-tier firms to prevent poaching. While early matching reduces the probability of hiring a high type worker, it prevents rivals from learning about the worker, making poaching difficult. As a result, unraveling can occur even in labor markets without a shortage of talent. When secondary markets are very transparent, unraveling disappears. However, the resulting matching is still inefficient due to the incentives of low-tier firms to communicate that they have not hired top-quality workers. Coordinating the timing of hiring does not mitigate the inefficiencies because firms continue to act strategically to prevent poaching.

You can see him talk about his job market paper in this four minute video:

 

He applies his model to a number of labor markets, both those which are unraveled and those which aren't:

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My advice if you're hiring: check him out.

PNAS celebrates Janet Currie

 The National Academy of Sciences celebrates Janet Currie in the current issue of PNAS, with an interview and an inaugural article.

QnAs with Janet Currie, by Tinsley H. Davis, PNAS September 29, 2020 117 (39) 24008-24009; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2017808117

"Many mental illnesses arise in adolescence, and a study of national insurance claims in the United States finds a large variance in how adolescent patients are treated even within the same zip code. The findings, reported in Janet Currie’s Inaugural Article (IA) (1), reveal that 45% of adolescents receive first-line treatments that are not approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) (1). Currie, elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2019, has studied children’s health for three decades. A professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University, Currie has undertaken pioneering economic analysis of child development, including analysis of the effects of the Head Start program on children (2, 3) and the effects of expansions of the Medicaid program for pregnant women and children (4, 5). In her IA (1), Currie analyzes a large national dataset to reveal disparities in treatment that cannot be attributed to supply-side factors, such as limited availability of treatment providers."

Here's the first question and answer:

"PNAS:What is the link between health and economics?

"Currie: Health can have an impact on how much human capital, like education, people are able to acquire. Moreover, healthcare is a business, and it accounts for almost 20% of US GDP [gross domestic product]. So there are two strands: One is thinking about health as a business, and another is thinking about health as a form of wealth. My work generally focuses more on that second aspect of health as a form of human capital. The Inaugural Article (1) brings those two strands together to a certain extent because mental health problems in children are one of the things that causes them to have less human capital than they might otherwise, and I’m looking at how those children with mental health problems end up getting treated by the healthcare system."

And here is her INAUGURAL ARTICLE

Treatment of mental illness in American adolescents varies widely within and across areas

Emily Cuddy and  Janet Currie, PNAS September 29, 2020 117 (39) 24039-24046; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2007484117

"Abstract: Many mental health disorders first manifest in adolescence, and early treatment may affect the course of the disease. Using a large national database of insurance claims, this study focuses on variations in the type of care that adolescent patients receive when they are treated for an initial episode of mental illness. We found large variations in the probability that children receive follow-up care and in the type of follow-up care received across zip codes. We also found large variations in the probability that children receive drug treatments that raise a red flag when viewed through the lens of treatment guidelines: Overall, in the first 3 mo after their initial claim for mental illness, 44.85% of children who receive drug treatment receive benzodiazepines, tricyclic antidepressants, or a drug that is not Food and Drug Administration-approved for their age. On average, these children are 12 y old. While the supply of mental health professionals impacts treatment choices, little of the overall variation is explained by supply-side variables, and at least half of the variation in treatment outcomes occurs within zip codes. These results suggest that other factors, such as physician practice style, may play an important role in the types of treatment that children receive."

Fuhito Kojima wins the 2021 Japanese Economic Association Nakahara Prize

 Congratulations to Fuhito Kojima, who is the 2021 winner of the Nakahara Prize of the Japanese Economic Association, which is awarded each year to an exceptional economist under the age of 45.

You can find the announcement (in Japanese) here. Google translate works well, and you can see the list of previous winners.

Here's part of the English announcement (which I can't find on the web...)

"The 2021 Japanese Economic Association Nakahara Prize

Professor Fuhito Kojima

"The Nakahara prize was established in 1995 and is funded by a donation from Mr. Nobuyuki Nakahara. The aim of the prize is to honor and encourage young researchers under the age of 45 to publish internationally recognized research. 

It is a great pleasure to announce that the 2021 Nakahara prize has been awarded to Professor Fuhito Kojima. Born in 1979, Professor Kojima received BA in economics from the University of Tokyo, and earned Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 2008. He was Assistant, Associate and then Full Professor of Economics at Stanford University, and he is Professor of Economics at the University of Tokyo from September 2020.

Professor Kojima’s research is focused on matching theory and market design. He has made a number of important contributions to the field. Many of his researches are motivated by various kinds of constraints imposed on matching problems in real life. His research significantly contributes to widening applicability of the theory to real matching markets.

...

"Selected Publications

1. “Job Matching under Constraints” (2020), joint with Ning Sun and Ning Neil Yu,  conditionally accepted, American Economic Review.

2. “Stable Matching in Large Economies” (2019), with Yeon-Koo Che and Jinwoo Kim, Econometrica, 87-1, pp65-110.

3. “Efficient Matching Under Distributional Constraints: Theory and Applications” (2015), with Yuichiro Kamada, American Economic Review, 105, pp 67-99.

4. “Matching with Couples: Stability and Incentives in Large Matching Markets” (2013), with Parag A. Pathak and Alvin E. Roth, Quarterly Journal of Economics 128, pp 1585-1632.

5. “Designing Random Allocation Mechanisms: Theory and Applications” (2013), with Eric Budish, Yeon-Koo Che, and Paul Milgrom, American Economic Review 103, pp 585-623.

6. “Asymptotic Equivalence of Probabilistic Serial and Random Priority Mechanisms” (2010), with Yeon-Koo Che, Econometrica 78, pp 1625-1672.

7. “Axioms for Deferred Acceptance” (2010), with Mihai Manea, Econometrica 78, pp 633-653.

8. “Incentives and Stability in Large Two-Sided Matching Markets” (2009), with Parag A. Pathak, American Economic Review 99, pp 608-27.

SELECTION COMMITTEE

Kosuke Aoki (Chair) (University of Tokyo), Anton Braun (Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta), Federico Echenique (California Institute of Technology), Yuichi Kitamura (Yale University), Fumio Ohtake (Osaka University), Tadashi Sekiguchi (Kyoto University), Mototsugu Shintani (University of Tokyo)

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By a strange coincidence,  in 2013 I was the recipient of a non-academic award signed by Mr. Nobuyuki Nakahara, whose interests extend beyond economics.

Profile of Amy Finkelstein in the PNAS

 Profile of Amy N. Finkelstein by Jennifer Viegas

"“It is a very exciting time to be an economist,” says Amy Finkelstein, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2018. “Economics has become a rigorous science, combining theory and data to better understand how the world works and how to improve it.” Focusing on the healthcare sector in the United States, Finkelstein integrates economic models, empirical methods, and data to find solutions for problems facing health insurance markets and healthcare delivery systems. Her research carries implications for healthcare policy. Finkelstein’s Inaugural Article (1) reports that a nationwide Medicare reform influenced the treatment of patients who were covered by other kinds of health insurance. The findings suggest that such broad effects should be taken into account when formulating future healthcare policies.

"Three Generations of Women with Doctorates

"Finkelstein was born in New York City in 1973 to biologist parents, who both earned doctorates at The Rockefeller University. In 1940, her mother immigrated to the United States from Poland, where her maternal grandmother had received a doctorate in comparative literature at the University of Warsaw. Finkelstein says, “It is remarkable that a Jewish woman in the 1920s was able to earn a doctorate in Eastern Europe.” The Finkelstein family papers documenting their lives are archived at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC."

JET Stanford

Here's an email sent yesterday by my department chair:

"It has belatedly come to my attention that the Journal of Economic Theory recently published a 50^th anniversary issue, which included a collection of the 50 most influential papers included in the journal since its inception.  Nine of those papers included coauthors who are members of our department.  Special congratulations to Paul Milgrom, who coauthored four of them! 

Here are the Stanford-Econ-coauthored papers on the list (I REALLY hope I didn't overlook any -- if so, please let me know!): 

David Kreps, Paul Milgrom, John Roberts, and Robert Wilson, “Rational cooperation in the finitely repeated prisoners’ dilemma,” JET, August 1982. 

Paul Milgrom and John Roberts, “Predation, reputation, and entry deterrence,” JET, August 1982. 

Paul Milgrom and Nancy Stokey, “Information, trade and common knowledge,” JET, February 1982.   

B. Douglas Bernheim, Bezalel Peleg, and Michael Whinston, “Coalition-Proof Nash Equilibria I. Concepts,” JET, June 1987. 

Drew Fudenberg, Bengt Holmstrom, and Paul Milgrom, “Short-term contracts and long-term agency relationships,” JET, June 1990. 

Matthew Jackson and Asher Wolinsky, “A Strategic Model of Social and Economic Networks,” JET, October 1996. 

Matthew Jackson and Alison Watts, “The evolution of social and economic networks,” JET, October 2002. 

Larry Epstein and Martin Schneider, “Recursive multiple-priors,” JET, November 2003. 

Alvin Roth, Tayfun Sonmez, and M. Utku Unver, “Pairwise kidney exchange,” JET, December 2005. 

Best, 

Doug

B. Douglas Bernheim

Edward Ames Edmonds Professor of Economics

Chair, Department of Economics"

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And here is the full list of 50 papers:

Articles celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Journal of Economic Theory

The design of the economics profession, in the Journal of Economic Literature

The current issue of the JEL actually includes several papers on market design. The one I blogged about yesterday concerns market design as an outward facing part of economics--economists help others design the markets they need.  The two I'll mention today are about the design of the academic profession of Economics itself, chiefly through the design of our system of publications (which in turn determines professional rewards like tenure and prestige).  Both papers argue that the norms of publishing in well-regarded journals may inhibit economists (particularly young economists) from tackling important problems in unconventional ways.


Sins of Omission and the Practice of Economics†
George A. Akerlof
Journal of Economic Literature 2020, 58(2), 405–418   https://doi.org/10.1257/jel.20191573

Abstract: "This paper advances the proposition that economics, as a discipline, gives rewards that favor the “hard” and disfavor the “soft.” Such bias leads economic research to ignore important topics and problems that are difficult to approach in a “hard” way— thereby resulting in “sins of omission.” This paper argues for reexamination of current institutions for publication and promotion in economics—as it also argues for greatly increased tolerance in norms for publication and promotion as one way of alleviating narrow methodological biases."


Publishing and Promotion in Economics: The Tyranny of the Top Five†
James J. Heckman and Sidharth Moktan*
Journal of Economic Literature 2020, 58(2), 419–470  https://doi.org/10.1257/jel.20191574

Abstract: "This paper examines the relationship between placement of publications in top five (T5) journals and receipt of tenure in academic economics departments. Analyzing the job histories of tenure-track economists hired by the top 35 US economics departments, we find that T5 publications have a powerful influence on tenure decisions and rates of transition to tenure. A survey of the perceptions of young economists supports the formal statistical analysis. Pursuit of T5 publications has become the obsession of the next generation of economists. However, the T5 screen is far from reliable. A substantial share of influential publications appear in non-T5 outlets. Reliance on the T5 to screen talent incentivizes careerism over creativity."

AEA Awards: Clark Medal and Distinguished Fellows

Here's the AEA announcement:

2020 American Economic Association Awards
Congratulations to the 2020 John Bates Clark Medalist, Melissa Dell, and to the newly elected Distinguished Fellows: Katharine Abraham, Shelly Lundberg, Paul Milgrom, and Whitney Newey. View the Press Release for all award announcements.

Melissa Dell, Clark Medalist 2020

Distinguished Fellows
The Award of Distinguished Fellow was instituted in 1965. Past Presidents of the Association and Walker Medalists shall be Distinguished Fellows. Additional Distinguished Fellows may be elected, but not more than four in any one calendar year from economists of high distinction in the United States and Canada. The following economists have received this award:

2020

• Katharine Abraham
• Shelly Lundberg
• Paul Milgrom
• Whitney Newey

Mentoring women assistant professors of Economics: an RCT (and some thoughts on the word "mentor")

From the NBER:

Can Mentoring Help Female Assistant Professors in Economics? An Evaluation by Randomized Trial
Donna K. Ginther, Janet Currie, Francine D. Blau, Rachel Croson

"Women continue to be underrepresented in academic ranks in the economics profession. The Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession of the American Economics Association established the CeMENT mentoring workshop to support women in research careers. The program was designed as a randomized controlled trial. This study evaluates differences between the treatment and control groups in career outcomes. Results indicate that relative to women in the control group, treated women are more likely to stay in academia and more likely to have received tenure in an institution ranked in the top 30 or 50 in economics in the world."

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There is probably no appropriate place to bring this up, but the word "mentor" always seemed to me to be faintly inappropriate in the particular context of addressing the difficulties associated with doing economics while female.

In Homer's Odyssey, Mentor is a man. But in fact, it is the goddess Athena who (in Alexander Pope's translation) " took Sage Mentor’s form, and thus like Mentor spoke." That is, often the advice that appears to come from (male) Mentor, in fact came from (female) Athena, disguised as Mentor.

So maybe female mentors of female economists should be athenas?

Corona virus research networks for economists

Corona virus, and the lockdowns and other policies it elicits, are attracting considerable attention from economists.  Below are some efforts to coordinate these research activities.

Stockholm School of Economics (SSE) is sponsoring the:
SSE CORONA ECONOMIC RESEARCH NETWORK

"The SSE Corona Economic Research Network (SSE-CERN) brings together researchers in economics and other disciplines that conduct research or policy work related to the Covid-19 pandemic. The network aims to stimulate research related to Covid-19, for example by communicating research and policy ideas and by organizing webinars. We also provide a list of research questions that we believe need to be answered and links to useful material about Covid-19."

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David Levine at the European University Institute (EUI) is coordinating a site for
COVID 19 RESEARCH 
Researchers collaborating for the endgame of the pandemic.

"Statement of Purpose: The purpose of this group is to draw on the talents and technical expertise of researchers to provide cost benefit analysis of mitigation measures and policy recommendations to be adopted, particularly for the endgame. The aim is to provide a conduit through which research can flow: matching expertise with questions and taking advantage of economies of scale to establish a credible organization that will be taken seriously by policy makers. The disease is international and so are we."

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And the European Economic Association is maintaining a List of Projects on corona virus related topic.

NSF report on Doctorate Recipients in the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE): 2017

Here's the Doctorate Recipients in the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE): 2017
NSF 20-310   |   March 16, 2020

There were almost 1,000 more doctorates awarded in Psychology in 2017 than the total in Economics plus Political Science plus Sociology.

I was surprised to note that the gender ratio of Economics doctorates is less extreme than that of Psychology doctorates, although in the opposite direction, and that Poli Sci doctorates are more evenly distributed between women and men (and the gender imbalance in Sociology is very close to Economics, also in the opposite direction.)


Here's a figure and a table from the pdf file.

History job market conference interviews are history

Inside Higher Ed has the story on the history job market (which they conflate with the AEA's recent decision to try to eliminate interviews in hotel rooms):

Killing the Conference Interview
American Historical Association ends annual meeting interviews and American Economic Association ends single hotel room interviews.
By Colleen Flaherty

"It's official: the American Historical Association will stop supporting first-round job interviews at its annual meeting.

"The group floated the idea this spring, citing a decline in registered departmental searches -- from 270 for the 2005 conference to 20 this year -- and a desire to take the meeting in new directions.

"After hearing overwhelming positive feedback from members, the AHA Council voted to end the 70-year-old tradition."

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I'm not intimately familiar with the History job market, but for economists, I think the tradition of interviewing at the January meetings has had a good effect on the job market, helping to coordinate timings, reduce costs, and provide a thick early part of the market.  I hope that we won't be starting on the road to moving interviews elsewhere and (particularly) at earlier and more diffuse times.

Marty Weitzman, 1942-2019

For many years, Marty and I both had offices on the third floor of the Littauer building at Harvard.  I didn't know him well, but he was a big thinker,  who thought unflinchingly about the tail-end dangers of climate change.

His obit in the NY Times suggests that he was despondent about the future.

Martin Weitzman, Virtuoso Climate Change Economist, Dies at 77
A pathfinder in environmental economics who insisted on factoring in the worst-case scenarios of global warming

"In “Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet” (2015), Professor Weitzman and his co-author, Gernot Wagner, an economist at New York University, wrote: “One thing we know for sure is that a greater than 10 percent chance of the earth’s eventual warming of 11 degrees Fahrenheit or more — the end of the human adventure on this planet as we now know it — is too high. And that’s the path the planet is on at the moment.”

“Most everything we know tells us climate change is bad,” the authors concluded. “Most everything we don’t know tells us it’s probably much worse.”

"His analysis of the economics of climate change became known as the Dismal Theorem."

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Update: here's the Washington Post's obit:


Martin Weitzman, environmental economist who emphasized uncertainty, dies at 77

European Job Market for Economists, 2019 (in Rotterdam, Dec. 18-19)

The European Economic Association has announced that a unified European job market will take place in Rotterdam December 18 and 19.

"The EEA is pleased to announce that the 2019 European Job Market for economists will take place on Wednesday, December 18 and Thursday December 19, in Rotterdam, Netherlands. The format will be the same as that of the inaugural 2018 European Job Market: it will take place immediately after the Econometric Society Winter Meetings and will feature, alongside job interviews, an educational session and an invited lecture by Thomas Piketty.

"The EEA has joined forces with the 2 main national associations in Europe who until now have organised their own job market – the Royal Economic Society (UK) and the Spanish Economic Association (SAE) – and there will be ONE consolidated Job Market in Europe from now on."

Here's the web site: European Job Market for Economists, 2019

Randomization in Economics: a history, by Julian Jamison

Randomized experiments have a long history:

The Entry of Randomized Assignment into the Social Sciences

By:Julian C. Jamison

JOURNAL OF CAUSAL INFERENCE

Volume: 7,  

Issue: 1 MAR 2019

Abstract

Although the concept of randomized assignment in order to control for extraneous confounding factors reaches back hundreds of years, the first empirical use appears to have been in an 1835 trial of homeopathic medicine. Throughout the 19th century there was a growing awareness of the need for comparison groups, albeit often without the realization that randomization could be a clean method to achieve that goal. In the second and more crucial phase of this history, four separate but related disciplines introduced randomized control trials within a few years of one another in the 1920s: agricultural science; clinical medicine; educational psychology; and social policy (specifically political science). This brought increasing rigor to fields that were focusing more on causal relationships. In a third phase, the 1950s through 1970s saw a surge of interest in more applied randomized experiments in economics and elsewhere - both in the lab and especially in the field.

Congratulations to Claudia Goldin: BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award

Here are the first two paragraphs of the announcement...

The BBVA Foundation recognizes Claudia Goldin for pioneering economic analysis of the gender gap
"The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Economics, Finance and Management category has gone in this eleventh edition to the American economic historian Claudia Goldin “for her groundbreaking contributions to the historical analysis of the role of women in the economy, and for her analysis of the reasons behind gender inequality.”

"Goldin “is credited with founding the field of empirical analysis of the gender gap,” remarked the committee on announcing its decision, starting with her seminal 1990 publication Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women. This hugely influential book examined the roots of wage inequality between men and women, questioning the conventional explanations.

Congratulations to Ed Glaeser, Scott Kominers, Mike Luca and Nikhil Naik (EI best paper award)

Congratulations to the authors of this fine paper, published in Economic Inquiry.

2018 Best EI Article Award Announced!

BIG DATA AND BIG CITIES: THE PROMISES AND 

LIMITATIONS OF IMPROVED MEASURES OF URBAN LIFE -- Volume 56, Issue 1, January 2018, Pages: 114-137
by Edward L. Glaeser, Scott Duke Kominers, Michael Luca, and Nikhil Naik

Abstract
"New, “big data” sources allow measurement of city characteristics and outcome variables at higher collection frequencies and more granular geographic scales than ever before. However, big data will not solve large urban social science questions on its own. Big urban data has the most value for the study of cities when it allows measurement of the previously opaque, or when it can be coupled with exogenous shocks to people or place. We describe a number of new urban data sources and illustrate how they can be used to improve the study and function of cities. We first show how Google Street View images can be used to predict income in New York City, suggesting that similar imagery data can be used to map wealth and poverty in previously unmeasured areas of the developing world. We then discuss how survey techniques can be improved to better measure willingness to pay for urban amenities. Finally, we explain how Internet data is being used to improve the quality of city services."


The paper's publication history says something about publishing, on line versus in print, at least in Economics.

Publication History

• Issue Online:27 November 2017
• Version of Record online:12 July 2016
• Manuscript accepted:23 February 2016
• Manuscript received:23 November 2015

Market design in Management Science (the journal)

The journal Management Science is open to market design papers in at least two of its departments. Gabriel Weintraub alerts me to the following announcement:

Revenue Management and Market Analytics Department in Management Science

It begins:

Dear MD colleagues:

We wrote the blog below about this new department in Management Science. Part of the mission of the department is related to “market analytics”, which has a significant market design component. We have been receiving several strong market design papers from economists and from other disciplines but would like to see more, so we are sharing this here. 

We look forward to receiving your work!

Best,

Gabriel Weintraub

Associate Professor

Stanford GSB

Economists as heroes (in new German book...)

Iconomix has a review of
Ökonomen sind Superhelden (Economists are superheroes)

"In his book, business journalist Malte Buhse shows how economists and economists hunt down criminals and save lives.
...
"Economists are modern superheroes and do outstanding things:

• Harvard economist Melissa Dell, for example, has used network research to simulate Mexican smuggling drug trafficking routes, giving investigators the most cost-effective transportation routes for drug trafficking. On the routes recommended by the model, the investigators were indeed successful.
• A similar problem was tackled by economists Eliana La Ferrara and Stefano Della Vigna with a completely different approach: to track down illegal arms transports, researchers tracked share price movements of smaller arms manufacturers and combined these data with the course of civil wars in countries such as Angola or Liberia. If the courses turned up after certain events, this aroused the suspicion of arms smuggling. Customs officials used this data to help enforce the arms embargo.
• An economist-superhero who won the Nobel Prize for his work is Alvin Roth. He has designed a market system that can help people with incurable kidney disease get a life-saving transplant. Often there is the problem that the patients find a donor-willing person in the immediate environment, but these are not considered as a donor due to the blood type. The market solution now is that such donor pairs are brought together and the relatives donate the kidney for the stranger - so to speak, crosswise. Thus, life can be saved with simple economic considerations."