Information from the AEA on this year's new Ph.D. job market

Here's an announcement that came by email from the American Economic Association:

Webinar on the new Ph.D. Job Market, hosted by the AEA ad hoc Committee on the Job Market

August 25, 2020 To: Members of the American Economic Association From: Peter L. Rousseau, Secretary-Treasurer The AEA's ad hoc Committee on the Job Market will host a webinar on the job market for new Ph.D. economists on Wednesday, September 2, from 3:00 – 4:30 p.m. ET.  The purpose of the webinar is to share information about the structure and timeline of the job market for new Economics Ph.D.s, and is intended to help job market candidates in 2020-21 as well as their advisors and placement committees. A pre-recorded video is available at https://www.aeaweb.org/joe/communications which provides information on the Economics Ph.D. job market, such as timelines, institutions, and general advice. The live 90 minute webinar will then be devoted to Q&A on either the material in the presentation or any other questions about the job market that participants may have.  Those answering questions at the webinar include the following: Aditya Aladangady, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve John Cawley, Cornell University Matthew Gentzkow, Stanford University Brooke Helppie-McFall, University of Michigan Elisabeth "Bitsy" Perlman, U.S. Census Bureau Peter Rousseau, Vanderbilt University and Secretary-Treasurer of the AEA Max Schmeiser, Head of Data Science at Twitter Wendy Stock, Montana State University Omari Swinton, Chair of the Economics Department at Howard University The pre-recorded video and the link to the live webinar will be available from the committee's webpage: https://www.aeaweb.org/joe/communications. This webinar is free and available to all.  Feel free to share with others.  *********** The communications page includes the following: Webinar on the Economics Ph.D. Job Market Part I (Asynchronous): Recorded video providing information on the job market timeline, institutions, etc. Part II (Synchronous): Live Q&A on Wednesday, Sept 2, 3:00 – 4:30 pm EDT (Link coming soon) AEA Guidance on Timeline for the 2020-21 Economics Job Cycle (August 20, 2020) Memo on the Impact of the 2008-09 Financial Crisis on the Demand for Ph.D. Economists (August 11, 2020) Memo on trends in Job Listings on JOE Network (July 14, 2020)

Will curtailing early hiring/unraveling help diversity?

If you run a company that hires very early, you likely hire from familiar places.  If talented recruits from more diverse backgrounds are harder to identify very early, you might want to slow things down a bit.  Here's a WSJ story, about what might signal a change in the famously unraveled market for young analysts in private equity:


Blackstone to Bypass Scramble for Investment-Bank Talent in Bid to Diversify Hiring
On-campus recruiting will be expanded to 44 schools from nine in 2015
By Miriam Gottfried, June 24, 2020

"Blackstone Group Inc., ...one of the most coveted employers on Wall Street, is throwing out a key section of its recruiting playbook in a bid to improve its hiring process and increase diversity.

"The investing giant and its private-equity peers have long engaged in a yearly race to pluck junior investment bankers already trained in spreadsheet and PowerPoint wizardry from firms such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley. The prize for those lucky enough to make the jump: entry-level jobs that can pay as much as $300,000 a year at some firms.

"Now Blackstone officials say the firm plans to sit out that contest in favor of on-campus recruiting, already its main source of talent and one that it is expanding to bring in more candidates directly from schools, including historically black colleges and universities and women’s colleges. Blackstone, which has been working for years to extend its campus reach, says it will directly recruit from 44 schools this academic year. That is up from just nine in 2015.
...
"Blackstone, the largest buyout firm with $538 billion of assets, received nearly 15,000 applications for just 90 full-time analyst roles that started last year. It has two main sources of new junior talent: campuses and investment banks, which have their own hotly competitive entry-level hiring operations.

In the case of the latter, recruitment used to happen during the summer after applicants’ first year on the job, but it has steadily crept forward as private-equity firms jump the starting gun in hopes of securing the best candidates. In 2019, recruiting took place in September, just a couple months after candidates began working at banks—for roles that wouldn’t start until summer 2021."

***********
Here's an earlier related post (from long ago, before Covid-19 and George Floyd...):

Monday, December 9, 2019

Unraveling has made investment banks the farm teams of private equity...

Job market technology is diffusing slowly through the armed forces

Here's a story from the Army Times, about trying to incorporate enlisted soldiers' preferences into their job assignments. (I hope to have something more to say about this in the future.)

Enlisted job marketplace launches this summer for select soldiers
 by Kyle Rempfer

"Armor, intelligence and some quartermaster troops will test a new assignment market system that launches this summer and is scheduled to go service-wide in January 2021, according to an Army news service release.

The Assignment Satisfaction Key-Enlisted Marketplace pilot program will launch in June, but was already tested by a smaller group of armor branch noncommissioned officers last year.

"The enlisted program matches up roughly with a similar officer marketplace already in use. The Army’s talent management initiatives began with the officer corps, because the population is much smaller and easier to run trials on than the enlisted force, according to Sgt. Maj. Wardell Jefferson, the Army G-1’s senior enlisted soldier.

...

"The pilot program could provide enlisted troops more choice in their careers than the current assignment system, which forces troops to choose six basing options — three in the United States and three overseas, Jefferson explained during a Facebook Town Hall on Monday.

The new system is expected to allow soldiers to rank order more assignment preferences. Army leaders have said that the marketplace will stabilize enlisted soldiers’ careers by weighing their preferences more in the assignment process and ensuring good soldiers are retained rather than lost to the civilian sector..

Curbside interviewing / hiring joins curbside pickup in a social-distancing economy

The WSJ has the story:

Job Recruitment Adopts Social Distancing as Coronavirus Alters Practices
Employers rethink how they hire, trying remote onboarding and curbside job fairs to reduce risks
By James T. Areddy, June 22, 2020

"During the parking-lot screening, the couple and other job seekers sat in their cars and provided recruiters, wearing face masks, with basic information for possible callbacks on a range of jobs in light industry and those requiring skilled labor.

"It is an example of how social distancing, needed to stem the coronavirus pandemic, is altering job recruitment."

Who are U.S. essential workers in the coronavirus lockdowns? McCormack, Avery, Spitzer and Chandra in JAMA

Here's a paper in JAMA that focuses on households with essential workers, many of whom are low income.   40% of adult workers are classified as essential workers, and a quarter of them earn less than $40,000.

McCormack G, Avery C, Spitzer AK, Chandra A. Economic Vulnerability of Households With Essential Workers. JAMA. Published online June 18, 2020. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.11366

"We analyzed data from the Public Use Microdata Sample of the 2018 American Community Survey (ACS). The US Census Bureau chooses a random sample of US addresses each month, contacts selected households by mail, and follows up by phone and personal visit to address nonresponse.3 The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released an “Essential Critical Infrastructure Workforce” advisory list of occupations necessary to “continuity of functions critical to public health and safety” in March 2020 and updated that list in April 2020.4 We matched industry and subindustry codes in the ACS to the 6-digit Standard Occupation Codes (indexed by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics) in the CISA advisory list to identify essential workers.5 We assessed the proportion and demographic characteristics (age, sex, race as given in response to a multiple-choice question) of essential workers by industry."

"Eight of the 21 industry categories from the ACS accounted for 73% of essential workers. Health care accounted for a larger proportion (15%) of essential workers than any other industry: 65% of health care workers held essential jobs. Black individuals were overrepresented in several essential industries, notably transportation (23%), public administration (18%), and health care (18%).

"A total of 1 410 976 households were represented in the 2018 ACS with an estimated 51% of those households including an essential worker. Table 2 summarizes household characteristics of essential workers: 25% of essential workers were estimated to have low household income, 18% to live in a household with at least 1 uninsured person, and 18% to live with someone 65 years or older. We estimated that 48% of essential workers lived in a household with at least 1 risk and 13% of essential workers lived in high-risk households."

Clearinghouses are hard to organize in a hurry: volunteer medical workers in NYC

Many healthcare workers are willing and able to come to New York to help with the shortages that Covid-19 has created there.  But existing staffing marketplaces seem to be the avenue by which many of them are in fact matched.

The NY Times has the story:

Volunteers Rushed to Help New York Hospitals. They Found a Bottleneck.
When New York called for volunteers to help fight the coronavirus, 90,000 people responded. The hard part? Getting them into hospitals.

"Ms. Strickland, a former pediatric intensive care unit nurse in High Point, N.C., spent hours trying to submit her volunteer application online, and then emailed city and state representatives. She never heard back.

"Frustrated, she reached out directly to Mount Sinai Queens hospital in New York City. A manager told her to use a private recruiting agency, which the hospital had used for years to bring in temporary staff.

"Within two days, Ms. Strickland, 47, received her assignment. She started this week in the hospital’s emergency department, making about $3,800 a week for three 12-hour shifts instead of doing it for free, as she had initially wanted.
...
"As of Wednesday, more than 90,000 retired and active health care workers had signed up online to volunteer at the epicenter of the pandemic, including 25,000 from outside New York, the governor’s office said.
...
"New York City hospitals have only deployed 908 volunteers as of Wednesday, according to city health officials.

"The urgent need for medical personnel is colliding head-on with the immovable bureaucracy of hospital regulations
...
"State officials said the volunteer portal, which was built from scratch, was initially overwhelmed by the response, but has since connected about 10,000 volunteers to hospitals in New York State within two weeks.
...
"The challenge of screening so many medical workers has opened an opportunity for the dozens of established private agencies that place temporary nurses and doctors at hospitals nationwide
...
"The staffing agencies, an $18 billion industry, say that unlike the state, they already have the technology and infrastructure in place to quickly check credentials for health professionals. In normal times, hospitals hire them to fill short-term staffing needs, such as during a regular flu season.

“As great as it is that the state is trying to help, it’s a very complex process to staff a clinician,” said Alexi Nazem, chief executive of Nomad Health, a health recruiting agency based in New York. “There are dozens of documents to verify. Our company has spent years building those systems.”
...
"New York City’s public hospitals had used private recruiters to bring in about 3,600 new medical workers as of late last week and were seeking to hire 3,600 more, according to the mayor and a city spokesman.

"One of those recruiting agencies, NuWest Group, began contracting with the city less than two weeks ago. Since then, the agency has secured hundreds of nurses and respiratory therapists for city hospitals, with some positions paying more than $10,000 a week, a spokeswoman for the agency said.

"Agencies, who negotiate the rates with hospitals, say that without the high pay, there would not be enough qualified clinicians willing to take jobs at the front lines
...
"Hospital staff members say they are grateful for any reinforcements, but some residents and nurses have expressed frustration over the pay disparities."

The labor force that is the Army

The Army Times has this story:

Choose your job: Army offers soldiers career agency to bolster retention
Kyle Rempfer

"Assignment Interactive Module 2.0 offers a virtual conduit through which units can advertise jobs; soldiers can attract hiring units by highlighting their life experiences, degrees and extracurricular pursuits; and the Army can gather large amounts of data on all of it.

"The marketplace has been open for the past four assignment cycles, but the latest iteration that closed this winter was the first where all positions were viewable to the entire moving population and the process was guided by the Army Talent Alignment Process rules, which more heavily weigh a soldier’s personal desires.

“This is the first time that we allowed complete transparency and also had set it up so the decisions that came out of this process were going to have the preference of the individual officer prioritized over any other consideration,” said Maj. Gen. J.P. McGee, director of the Army’s Talent Management Task Force.

"Officers participating in the first assignment cycle had roughly two months to contact the unit and ask questions, such as about the command climate and the training calendar. Officers could also speak directly to unit leadership, make a value proposition to them and learn what the unit offers in return.

"And while the Assignment Interactive Module 2.0 is currently only available for officers, an enlisted virtual marketplace is expected to deploy in January 2021.
*************

The Armed Forces News has this one:
Army Tests New Enlisted Assignment System
Published: March 12, 2020
"Spurred by the success of a similar program for officers, the Army will begin a pilot plan to implement a marketplace-style assignment system for enlisted soldiers, the Association of the U.S. Army reported. Beginning this summer, soldiers and non-commissioned officers in armor, military intelligence and quartermaster military occupational specialties (MOSs) will take part in testing of the Assignment Satisfaction Key-Enlisted Marketplace, AUSA reported, citing an Army press release. By the beginning of next year, the Army expects to have the system in place for the entire force.

"The plan calls for soldiers to be able to view a complete list of available positions from which to choose. They would then be able to rank their preference for new assignments based on personal and family needs, AUSA reported."

***********

and the WSJ has this one:

In Generational Shift, Army Uses a New System to Promote Hundreds of Officers
The Army is revamping its process and adapting private-sector techniques to choose new battalion commanders, a keystone position

"The U.S. Army has initiated the biggest shift since the Vietnam War era in how it selects a key class of officers, drawing on the hiring practices of private-sector organizations and corporations such as the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Google.

"The aim is to move away from techniques used for over 50 years that rely on past military jobs, physical fitness scores and the recommendations of generals to promote officers to the job of battalion commander.

"The new system includes surveys by subordinates, writing tests, psychological assessments, cognitive evaluations and a series of simulated militarylike scenarios in a wooded area on base to gauge leadership and problem-solving abilities.

"It stresses anonymity to eliminate any possible bias. As soon as candidates arrive, they are assigned a number and aren’t known by their names. At an interview, candidates are seated behind a black curtain, and a five-member selection panel is unable to see a candidate’s uniform, with its career-defining ribbons and patches."

College Admissions--the musical (casting call)

Here's the casting call, from Playbill. (College admissions is interesting, and so is the labor market for theatrical performances...)

College Admissions Scandal Musical Ranked Now Accepting Submissions
BY DAN MEYER  FEB 21, 2020
 The casting call seeks performers ages 18–early 20s.

"The new musical Ranked, which follows the 2019 college admissions scandal, is now accepting video submissions for an upcoming industry presentation to be filmed by HBO for a documentary.

"The casting call seeks Non-Equity/Non-SAG-AFTRA performers ages 18–early 20s (to play 14–18 years old). To submit, send a video singing 32 bars of a contemporary pop or rock song (i.e. Pasek & Paul, Tom Kitt, Sara Bareilles), headshot and résumé to RankedCasting@gmail.com before February 26 at noon ET.

"Stephanie Klapper Casting will screen the audition tapes prior to an in-person casting call on March 2. Performers must be available for the entire rehearsal and presentation time period, March 16–20. A March 20 industry presentation at The Daryl Roth Theatre will be filmed by HBO."

Unraveling has made investment banks the farm teams of private equity...

...at least that's the argument made in this article (full of nitty gritty detail) at Vanity Fair:

“IT’S, LIKE, LAWLESS”: HOW PRIVATE-EQUITY HEADHUNTERS ARE BLEEDING WALL STREET
In the battle for young talent, investment banks have been reduced to prep schools for private equity. Inside the cutthroat recruiting process launching the next generation of the superrich—and what it reveals about the status realignment rocking Wall Street.
BY WILLIAM D. COHAN

"The recruitment calendar keeps accelerating. Two years before he started at Morgan Stanley, the former analyst said, the private-equity vultures began circling the investment banks in March. The following year, recruiting began in April. Today, analysts who begin at Morgan Stanley in August are being courted by private-equity firms in mid-September—just weeks after they arrive.

"This super-charged dynamic can make for very odd interviews. “It’s so accelerated. Basically what you’re doing at the private-equity firm is you are saying, First of all, can this person hold a conversation?” the former analyst says. After that, the private equity people want to know what members of the new class are specializing in, and at which Wall Street bank. “Kids that are working in the mergers and acquisitions group at Morgan Stanley are probably going to get a great experience 8 times out of 10,” he explains. “Nine times out of 10. So I will want to interview those people that I consider to be in good groups at strong banks, where I hope and I assume that they are going to get the experience that they need that, by two years from now, when they come in the door, they are educated and their analytical skills and financial skills are up to snuff.”
...
"Somewhat surprisingly, most firms don’t seem to object. Rather, they have come to grips with the reality of the situation, even if they don’t like it, and recognize that they risk not getting the analysts at all if they put up too much of a stink. Some firms even encourage the analysts to go to private-equity firms—because that gives them a better chance of getting the very best college graduates. A partner at one firm even went to bat for one of the analysts who made it through the second round of recruiting at a big private-equity firm, but did not make it to the final round. The partner called up someone he knew at the private-equity firm and got the analyst back into the process. He got the job. “It’s like, I’m going to get you whatever job you want, but you’re going to bust your balls for me for the next two years,” the partner tells me.

"One young banker who got an offer from Blackstone recalled the supportive response when he walked into a partner’s office to share the good news. “He said, ‘That’s great. I’ve got to do a good job training you so that Jon Gray’”—Blackstone’s new president and chief operating officer—“‘thinks that I did a good job with you.’” (There is one exception to this good humor: Goldman Sachs, which has a three-year analyst program. “If they find out you are recruiting, they’re going to fire you,” says one analyst. “It’s official policy.” A Goldman spokesman says while that is true, some of their analysts still get recruited away from the firm.)".
************

Earlier post:

Monday, September 23, 2019

Private equity races for young talent even earlier this year

Private equity races for young talent even earlier this year

Eric Budish sends me this pointer to the continued unraveling of the recruiting of young investment bankers into private equity firms:

Private-equity firms are already interviewing 22-year-old bankers who will start in 2 years. Their earliest-ever hiring kickoff shows how crazy the battle for talent has gotten.  

"Private-equity firms are already interviewing first-year investment-banking analysts to fill 2021 associate positions, marking the earliest-ever kickoff to recruiting for those roles, sources told Business Insider.

...

"Last year, firms started interviewing in late October, recruiters said. This year, the PE firms are already moving in after analysts — typically 22-year-olds who just graduated from college the previous spring — who have only a few weeks of work experience under their belts.  

"Sources including academic advisers, recruiters, and insiders at PE firms told Business Insider that the activity was widespread, including at firms such as Thoma Bravo and TA Associates that were early movers last year but also at some of the largest firms including Warburg Pincus, TPG, and KKR. 

...

"Private-equity firms have pushed up the recruiting timeline over the past several years, despite how difficult it is to assess bankers so early in their careers. Still, they feel the need to remain competitive and get first dibs on the best talent.  "

Predicting stable matches from the preferences of one side of the market: Haeringer and Iehlé in AEJ-Micro

Two-Sided Matching with (Almost) One-Sided Preferences
By Guillaume Haeringer and Vincent Iehlé
American Economic Journal: Microeconomics 2019, 11(3): 155–190.


Abstract: "In a two-sided matching context we show how we can predict  stable matchings  by  considering  only  one  side’s  preferences  and  the  mutually  acceptable  pairs  of  agents.  Our  methodology  consists  of  identifying  impossible  matches,  i.e.,  pairs  of  agents  that  can  never  be matched together in a stable matching of any problem consistent with  the  partial  data.  We  analyze  data  from  the  French  academic  job  market  for  mathematicians  and  show  that  the  match  of  about  45 percent of positions (and about 60 percent of candidates) does not depend on the preferences of the hired candidates, unobserved and submitted at the final stage of the market."


Haeringer and Iehlé present new theory and explore an interesting data set, described as follows:

"Market for Mathematicians
In 1998, a small group of young mathematicians set up a website, Opération Postes,  inviting  recruiting  committees  to  announce  the  lists  of  candidates  to  be  interviewed  as  well  as  the  rankings  of  candidates  that  will  be  submitted  to  the  clearinghouse (the ministry), as soon as these would be decided.19 The community of mathematicians was very responsive and the website quickly became a central tool  in  the  job  market.20  The  data  for  each  position  (interviewees  list  and  rank-ings) is usually uploaded by the the chairs of the recruiting committees themselves (and  if  not,  by  a  member  of  the  committee).  On  average,  about  90–95 percent  of  the  job  openings’  interview  lists  and  rankings  are  available.21  The  data  of  Opération  Postes  is  public,  although  not  in  a  format  that  makes  it  immediately  usable  for  any  analysis.  There  are  many  misspellings,  and  we  sometimes  found  confusions  between  the  married  and  maiden  names  of  some  female  candidates.  By  cross-referencing the data with other sources we were able to compose a clean dataset.22We  also  collected  for  each  year  the  assignment  of  candidates  to  departments.  This  assignment  is  computed  by  the  Ministry  of  Higher  Education  by  using  candidate’s  submitted  preference  lists  over  the  departments  and  the  rankings  of  candidates established by the recruiting committees."

Matching in Google's internal labor market

Bo Cowgill and Rembrand Koning have written a Harvard Business School case study called Matching Markets for Googlers

Abstract: "This case describes how Google designed and launched an internal matching market to assign individual workers with projects and managers. The case evaluates how marketplace design considerations—and several alternative staffing models—could affect the company’s goals and workers’ well-being. It discusses the details of implementation as well as the intended (and unintended) consequences of the internal match system. The case concludes with a debate about how the Chameleon marketplace could expand to include more Googlers and illustrates what to consider when thinking about launching new matching markets in organizations."

"Kuehn and her team launched the Chameleon program at the end of 2015 to optimize employees’ careers and Google’s business needs. Unlike most internal staffing paradigms, Chameleon did not rely on a central HR coordinator to assign the unit’s hundreds of individual contributors (ICs) to roles in its dozens of teams. Nor did Chameleon rely on self-initiated transfers, nor ad hoc, centrally planned reorganizations.

"Instead, under Chameleon, a staffing marketplace would open up three times during the year. At the start of each round, ICs would use Chameleon’s online platform to submit private rankings of the available roles. In turn, the ICs would be ranked by the manager responsible for each open role. The Chameleon platform would then turn these rankings into matches using a simple but robust marketplace algorithm, assigning ICs to roles for the next 6–18 months."
*******
Not a spoiler: It's a deferred acceptance algorithm...

A big role is played by a pseudonymous Googler who the case calls Bradford Preston, who was familiar with the market design literature and who "moved to a part-time role so that he could begin a PhD in economics."

There's much more, about getting this kind of internal marketplace adopted. And apparently new Googlers are called Nooglers.

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

Cadet branch matching satisfies traditional assumptions: Ravi Jagadeesan in AEJ: Micro

Cadet-Branch Matching in a Kelso-Crawford Economy
By Ravi Jagadeesan
American Economic Journal: Microeconomics 2019, 11(3): 191–224https://doi.org/10.1257/mic.20170192191


Abstract: "Sönmez (2013)  and  Sönmez  and  Switzer  (2013)  used  matching  theory  with  unilaterally  substitutable  priorities  to  propose  mechanisms  to  match  cadets  to  military  branches.  This  paper  shows  that,  alternatively,  the  Sönmez  and  Sönmez–Switzer  mechanisms  can  be  constructed  as descending  salary  adjustment  processes  in Kelso-Crawford (1982)  economies  in  which  cadets  are  (grossly) substitutable.  The  lengths  of  service  contracts  serve  as  (inverse) salaries. The underlying substitutability explains the unilateral substitutability of the priorities utilized by Sönmez and Sönmez-Switzer."

...
"This paper shows that cadet-branch matching does not formally require matching theory with weakened substitutability conditions or many-to-many matching. I restore substitutability(in the sense of Kelso and Crawford 1982 and Hatfield and Milgrom 2005) by changing priorities to systematically favor long contracts. This change  of  priorities  does  not  affect  the  deferred  acceptance  mechanism.  Defining  the “salary” corresponding to a contract to be any decreasing function of the service time, the substitutable priorities are generated by maximizing a quasi-linear utility function.4  If  cadets  prefer  short  contracts,  then  the  cadet-branch  economy  can  be  regarded  as  a  job  market  in  the  Kelso-Crawford  (1982)  model,  and  the  Sönmez  (2013) and Sönmez-Switzer (2013) mechanisms correspond to the descending salary adjustment process. Thus, the Sönmez and Sönmez-Switzer mechanisms feature cadets bidding against each other in an ascending auction in service length."
***********

This paper admirably tidies up this corner of the stable matching literature.

There is of course also a market design question lurking in the background, concerning how the armed forces should match service members to jobs. (The present paper doesn't take a position on that.)

It isn't obvious that stability, in the sense of avoiding blocking pairs between service members and military assignments, is an appropriate market design objective for military job assignments.  This is because the military has an immense amount of unified control over military assignments, and so there isn't a lot of room for such blocking pairs to form, i.e. there isn't much opportunity for one military branch to recontract with a service member to change his or her assignment once it has been made.  One of the problems that military assignment mechanisms actually do have to deal with is that service members periodically come to the end of their enlistment period, and have to be given incentives to re-enlist. So the relevant blocking pairs might be those between service members and civilian jobs. How best to address these in the contexts of military assignments is an open question.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine have very recently convened a committee to study aspects of the management of human capital in the military, whose work may  begin to shed some light on this. Here's a link:
Strengthening Air Force Human Capital Management

Repugnant phrasing

Japan's labor and immigration policies have been more restrictive than welcoming to an immigrant/migrant labor force.  So one can imagine a cheerful headline saying that was about to change, something along the lines of the final paragraph quoted below.  I don't think the following WSJ headline quite does the trick:

Japan Aims to Hire Foreigners for Nuclear Cleanup
The country’s largest utility is working to decommission the Fukushima plant amid radiation risks at the site of the 2011 disaster

"TOKYO—Japan’s largest utility is looking to foreign blue-collar workers to help decommission its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power plant amid a labor shortage exacerbated by radiation risks at the site of the 2011 nuclear disaster.

"Tokyo Electric Power Co. , or Tepco, said Thursday it has informed dozens of contractors that foreigners could qualify for a new type of visa that allows manual workers to stay in the country for five years. Workers who enter areas with elevated radiation would need sufficient Japanese-language skills to comprehend radiation levels and safety instructions, a Tepco spokeswoman said.

"The move is a shift in strategy for Tepco, which hasn’t employed large numbers of blue-collar foreigners at the Fukushima plant. As of February, there were 29 foreign workers, the spokeswoman said.

"Under a new law that went into effect this month, Japan plans to open its doors to about 340,000 workers over the next five years to help fill job vacancies in chronically understaffed industries such as construction and nursing care. The new law also creates another type of visa for higher-skilled blue-collar workers who can stay indefinitely."

Finding out what employers value in a candidate, without deception, by Kessler, Low and Sullivan

Many experiments designed to detect how employers evaluate applications employ deception: artificial applications are sent to employers in response to advertisements of job openings, and the responses are recorded. This involves deception (to get employers to devote resources to fake applications).  Here's a design that seeks the same information without deception.

Incentivized Resume Rating: Eliciting Employer Preferences without Deception

Judd B. Kessler, Corinne Low, Colin Sullivan

NBER Working Paper No. 25800
Issued in May 2019 

"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."

Do child labor laws apply to social media?

The Guardian asks the question:
'It's not play if you're making money': how Instagram and YouTube disrupted child labor laws

"while today’s child stars can achieve incredible fame and fortune without ever setting foot in a Hollywood studio, they may be missing out on one of the less glitzy features of working in the southern California-based entertainment industry: the strongest child labor laws for performers in the country.

"Those laws, which were designed to protect child stars from exploitation by both their parents and their employers, are not being regularly applied to today’s pint-sized celebrities, despite the fact that the major platforms, YouTube and Instagram, are based in California. The situation is a bit like “Uber but for … child labor”, with a disruptive technology upending markets by, among other things, side-stepping regulation."

EconTrack: The AEA's Job Market Information Board

The AEA has launched a job market information board, which will collect information about the progress of interviews and flyouts for (I imagine) jobs that advertise in the JOE.

Here it is:  EconTrack: The AEA's Job Market Information Board, and the headings for the information they hope to track as the job market develops are these:

Institution, Job Title, Fields, Application Deadline, Interviewing at ASSA?, Interview Invitations Issued, Campus Visits Issued, List of Campus Invitees...

The (hot) job market for "Digitization Economists"

HBS interviews Mike Luca on the market for new economists (and his recent paper with Susan Athey):
Hunting for a Hot Job in High Tech? Try 'Digitization Economist'

"Some 50 tech companies “have been snapping up economists at a remarkable scale,” says Michael Luca, the Lee J. Styslinger III Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. “All of the big Bay Area tech companies have teams of economists, and lots of the smaller companies are starting to hire handfuls of them.” The list includes Google, Microsoft, Airbnb, Uber, Facebook, and numerous smaller companies.

"Tech companies are turning to sharp economic minds to provide their unique lens on business problems like advertising auctions and market design. The accelerating phenomenon has given rise to a new field within economics called the economics of digitization. Research from the field is quickly finding its way into practice, directly through the work of PhD economists, and in the classroom, as HBS and other business schools add more tech-germane courses to their MBA offerings."

Postdocs in market design at Melbourne

Alex Nichifor directs my attention to this ad in the JOE:

The University of Melbourne

Faculty of Business and Economics

Centre for Market Design

Post-Doctoral Research Fellow(s)

JOE ID Number: 2018-02_111460587

Date Posted: 09/11/2018

Position Title/Short Description

Title: Post-Doctoral Research Fellow(s)
Section: International: Other Academic (Visiting or Temporary)
Location: Melbourne, Victoria, AUSTRALIA
JEL Classification: D -- Microeconomics
Keywords:

microeconomics
market design
microeconomic theory

Salary Range: AUD$98,775 – AUD$117,290 p.a plus superannuation

Full Text of JOE Listing:

The Centre for Market Design (http://cmd.org.au/) of the Department of Economics at the University of Melbourne seeks to appoint one or more Post-Doctoral Fellows with interests in market design, mechanism design, industrial organization and/or applied microeconomics. The objectives of the Centre are to: (i) undertake research in market design and its associated academic disciplines; (ii) support an innovative microeconomic policy agenda with the aim of solving significant social and economic problems through the design of policy mechanisms; (iii) build capability in theory and empirics pertaining to market design. Working collaboratively with a team of leading academics, researchers, and doctoral students, Post-Doctoral Fellows will conduct research in support of the agenda of the Centre along with developing their own research careers. Applications are sought from individuals with a variety of backgrounds and interests in market design and microeconomics, as the activities of the Centre span applied policy problems, field and lab experiments, data collection, econometric modelling, and data analysis, along with microeconomic theory. Salary and research support will be competitive and the starting date is negotiable.

To ensure full consideration, applications must be received by December 15, 2018.

Additional information is available from: http://jobs.unimelb.edu.au/caw/en/job/897519/postdoctoral-research-fellow-economics?