Early admissions come to English universities

The Guardian has the story:
Top universities 'ignoring final A-level grades' in race to sign up students
"Universities such as Lancaster and Birmingham are making record numbers of "unconditional offers" – places awarded irrespective of final A-level grades – in 2015"

"Leading universities have been accused of undermining A-levels by accepting students before they sit their final exams in a “desperate” rush to fill places.

"Research by the Telegraph shows universities are preparing to make increasing numbers of “unconditional offers” to sixth-formers next year.

"Top research institutions including Birmingham, Lancaster, Nottingham, Leicester, Sussex and Queen Mary, University of London, will admit students en masse in some subjects without waiting for results in August.

"Numbers are expected to significantly exceed the 12,000 unconditional offers made across the UK this year, with one university alone saying it will make 10,000 in 2015.
The move coincides with a government decision to abolish all restrictions on student recruitment in England for the first time in 2015 – creating a free market in undergraduate admissions.

"It has led to intense competition between universities to sign up the most talented sixth-formers before they are attracted to opposing institutions.

"In most cases, admissions tutors will make places available to candidates based on past performance in GCSEs and their predicted A-level grades, meaning students will win places even if they go on to fail their summer exams."

Unraveling of private equity recruiting

Can competition by speed play a big role in a market in which there's also a lot of competition by price? You bet it can. The NY Times has the story: A Mad Scramble for Young Bankers Wall Street Banks and Private Equity Firms Compete for Young Talent

"A battle is raging on Wall Street as never before, with powerful factions scrambling for control of a precious resource.

On one side are the giant investment banks, with names like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Lined up against them, but also warring among themselves, are the giants of private equity — Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Apollo Global Management and the Blackstone Group, to name just three. And the private-equity firms just happen to be the banks’ clients.

The prize they are fighting for is young talent.

This summer, dozens of junior bankers in their early to mid-20s will start jobs in private equity after spending their first two years out of college working at investment banks. Private-equity firms use billions of dollars of cash and plenty of debt to buy entire companies. They are seen by many young strivers as the next rung on an elite career ladder, promising higher status and more pay — around $300,000 a year, including salary and bonus, roughly double what a second-year banker might earn at Goldman.

But for junior bankers, who are known as analysts, securing such a job means stepping into the middle of a Wall Street struggle that has intensified since the financial crisis.

The whirlwind process of interviews, which this year started in February, far earlier than many in private equity had expected, requires analysts to sneak around and often miss work. It bears little resemblance to the orderly on-campus career fairs they attended in college.

...

To recruit young talent today, the private-equity firms make offers as long as 18 months before a job begins.

This timing is repellent to many bank executives, and not only because their workers are being poached. Promising to take a job with a particular firm can create a conflict of interest for an investment bank analyst, especially one assigned to work with private-equity firms on deals, bankers say.

Goldman Sachs, for example, requires junior workers to resign soon after accepting a job at a private-equity firm. Such a rule is at odds with private equity’s recruiting timeline, leaving many junior bankers to ignore it. And the recruiting process, despite a recent attempt to change it, has grown only more frenzied.

This year, on a Thursday night in February, a handful of investment bank analysts saw their cellphones light up. Amity Search Partners, a major recruiter, told the analysts to prepare to interview the next morning, for jobs that would start in summer 2015.

Already, these analysts — fresh graduates of elite universities who were only about six months into their first jobs on Wall Street — had attended cocktail events and breakfasts sponsored by private-equity firms. But now it had emerged that smaller firms were already interviewing. So one of the biggest players in private equity, Apollo Global Management, which had hired Amity, was quietly taking its own process to the next level, weeks earlier than its rivals had expected. (Representatives of Apollo and Amity declined to comment.)

Word spread quickly, sending other recruiters into strategy sessions that stretched into the wee hours. Recruiters are often paid fees equivalent to about a third of the first-year compensation of workers they place.

One private-equity firm, Silver Lake, scrambled to set up interviews for that afternoon. Kohlberg Kravis Roberts scheduled interviews for that Saturday.Bain Capital, which had planned a preliminary get-to-know-us event for Friday evening, received a number of cancellations from analysts already interviewing elsewhere.

The machine was in motion — a situation that made hardly anyone happy.

...

“It’s bad for the candidates because they have to make decisions really early,” Mr. Sheyner said. “It’s really bad for the banks. They just hired those people a few months ago. And it’s bad for private equity because they don’t have a track record to go on.”

...

Wall Street has tried before to bring some order to private-equity recruiting. The six major private-equity firms, after years of interviewing candidates far in advance, decided two years ago to wait.

The companies — Apollo, Bain, K.K.R., the Blackstone Group, TPG and the Carlyle Group — all chose to wait until January 2013 to recruit the workers who would start that summer, according to two people with direct knowledge of the situation, who would discuss private business matters only on condition of anonymity.

But the détente soon fell apart. Smaller private-equity firms had done their recruiting on the earlier schedule. The giants grew concerned that they might be missing out on the most desirable candidates.

...

In April 2013, the six biggest companies returned to their early schedules, and the next cycle began, with junior bankers getting offers to start in the summer of 2014.

...

Such policies have pushed recruiting further into the shadows. At Goldman, analysts whisper about the time in 2012 when the firm cracked down.

That year, certain analysts, whom Goldman believed had job offers from private-equity firms or hedge funds, were pulled into conference rooms and asked, point blank, about their employment plans, according to an analyst in that class and another person briefed on the matter.

“The majority of us lied,” the analyst said, insisting on anonymity so as not to damage his relationship with Goldman.

Goldman ended up dismissing several analysts who acknowledged they had accepted offers, sending ripples of anxiety through Wall Street’s junior ranks. The financial gossip blog Dealbreaker ran a post with the headline, “Goldman Sachs Does Not Look Kindly Upon First Year Analysts Who Plan In Advance.”

The (changing) market culture of recruiting college athletes early

Luke Coffman pointed out this article: Flipping out--More recruits are decommitting as college choices become business decisions, whose URL reads like a summary of the article http://espn.go.com/college-sports/recruiting/football/story/_/id/10391907/examining-pre-signing-day-flipping-epidemic-college-football-recruiting 

It starts with this:
"Dalvin Cook makes no apologies for the wild ride on which he took recruiters over the past two years.

"The five-star running back from Miami Central, who enrolled last month at Florida State, pledged in June 2012 to Clemson. He switched his commitment to Florida in April 2013 before flipping to the Seminoles during an ESPNU interview on New Year's Eve while practicing for the Under Armour All-America Game.

"Amid the indecision, he signed scholarship paperwork with Florida, FSU and hometown Miami"

The story goes on
"As recruiting continues to accelerate into the freshman and sophomore years, prospects often reach decisions without an understanding of their opportunities.

"We just keep recruiting until the first Wednesday in February every year," UCLA defensive line coach and recruiting coordinator Angus McClure said. "That's all you can do.

Unraveling of college athletic recruiting

At Stanford, when I meet student athletes I sometimes ask them when they first met a Stanford coach, and the earliest answer I've gotten so far is 8th grade. Here's a great NY Times story by Nathaniel Popper that confirms this isn't an extreme outlier.

Committing to Play for a College, Then Starting 9th Grade

"In today’s sports world, students are offered full scholarships before they have taken their first College Boards, or even the Preliminary SAT exams. Coaches at colleges large and small flock to watch 13- and 14-year-old girls who they hope will fill out their future rosters. This is happening despite N.C.A.A. rules that appear to explicitly prohibit it.

"The heated race to recruit ever younger players has drastically accelerated over the last five years, according to the coaches involved. It is generally traced back to the professionalization of college and youth sports, a shift that has transformed soccer and other recreational sports from after-school activities into regimens requiring strength coaches and managers.

...

"Early scouting has also become more prevalent in women’s sports than men’s, in part because girls mature sooner than boys. But coaches say it is also an unintended consequence of Title IX, the federal law that requires equal spending on men’s and women’s sports. Colleges have sharply increased the number of women’s sports scholarships they offer, leading to a growing number of coaches chasing talent pools that have not expanded as quickly. In soccer, for instance, there are 322 women’s soccer teams in the highest division, up from 82 in 1990. There are now 204 men’s soccer teams.

“In women’s soccer, there are more scholarships than there are good players,” said Peter Albright, the coach at Richmond and a regular critic of early recruiting. “In men’s sports, it’s the opposite.”

"While women’s soccer is generally viewed as having led the way in early recruiting, lacrosse, volleyball and field hockey have been following and occasionally surpassing it, and other women’s and men’s sports are becoming involved each year when coaches realize a possibility of getting an edge.

"Precise numbers are difficult to come by, but an analysis done for The New York Times by the National Collegiate Scouting Association, a company that consults with families on the recruiting process, shows that while only 5 percent of men’s basketball players and 4 percent of football players who use the company commit to colleges early — before the official recruiting process begins — the numbers are 36 percent in women’s lacrosse and 24 percent in women’s soccer.

At universities with elite teams like North Carolina and Texas, the rosters are almost entirely filled by the time official recruiting begins.
...
For girls and boys, the trend is gaining steam despite the unhappiness of many of the coaches and parents who are most heavily involved, many of whom worry about the psychological and physical toll it is taking on youngsters.

“It’s detrimental to the whole development of the sport, and to the girls,” Haley’s future coach at Texas, Angela Kelly, said at the Florida tournament.

:The difficulty, according to Ms. Kelly and many other coaches, is that if they do not do it, other coaches will, and will snap up all of the best players. Many parents and girls say that committing early ensures they do not miss out on scholarship money.
...
"The N.C.A.A. rules designed to prevent all of this indicate that coaches cannot call players until July after their junior year of high school. Players are not supposed to commit to a college until signing a letter of intent in the spring of their senior year.

"But these rules have enormous and widely understood loopholes. The easiest way for coaches to circumvent the rules is by contacting the students through their high school or club coaches. Once the students are alerted, they can reach out to the college coaches themselves with few limits on what they can talk about or how often they can call.

"Haley said she was having phone conversations with college coaches nearly every night during the eighth grade.
...
"Mr. Dorrance, who has won 22 national championships as a coach, said he was spending his entire weekend focusing on the youngest girls at the tournament, those in the eighth and ninth grades. Mr. Dorrance is credited with being one of the first coaches to look at younger players, but he says he is not happy about the way the practice has evolved.

“It’s killing all of us,” he said.

"Mr. Dorrance’s biggest complaint is that he is increasingly making early offers to players who do not pan out years later.

“If you can’t make a decision on one or two looks, they go to your competitor, and they make an offer,” he said. “You are under this huge pressure to make a scholarship offer on their first visit.”

"The result has been a growing number of girls who come to play for him at North Carolina and end up sitting on the bench.
...
"Once the colleges manage to connect with a player, they have to deal with the prohibition on making a formal scholarship offer before a player’s final year of high school. But there is now a well-evolved process that is informal but considered essentially binding by all sides. Most sports have popular websites where commitments are tallied, and coaches can keep up with who is on and off the market.

"Either side can make a different decision after an informal commitment, but this happens infrequently because players are expected to stop talking with coaches from other programs and can lose offers if they are spotted shopping around. For their part, coaches usually stop recruiting other players."
**************************

The article makes reference to a 2011 paper by Boston College Law professor Alfred Yen: Early Scholarship Offers and the NCAA

HT: Stephanie Hurder

The Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan is officially over

Here is the official announcement, dated January 13, 2014:

To: All United States Judges
From: Judge John D. Bates
RE: LAW CLERK HIRING (INFORMATION)

In accordance with recommendations made by the Online System for Clerkship
Application and Review (OSCAR) Working Group (Working Group), I am writing to inform
you that the Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan has effectively been discontinued and no further
dates are being set in connection with that plan.
I also have adopted the Working Group’s recommendation that there be a phased
approach for opening OSCAR to law school students in 2014. The Administrative Office
will open OSCAR to rising second-year law school students in a read-only capacity effective
June 1, 2014, and permit them to build and finalize clerkship applications effective August 1,
2014. Third-year law school students and alumni will continue to have full access to OSCAR
year-round.
The Working Group judges have developed a list of Federal Law Clerk Hiring Best
Practices to support transparency in the hiring process. In addition, the Working Group is
asking the National Association for Law Placement to create a list for judges of
recommendations regarding clerkship recruiting best practices from the law school
perspective. The Administrative Office will post the list in OSCAR. I hope you will find
both lists helpful in determining your clerkship recruitment and hiring practices.
The Judiciary supports a transparent clerkship recruitment and hiring process, and
OSCAR plays a valuable role in ensuring transparency. OSCAR’s online application process
eliminates paper and saves court staff time. Using OSCAR adds diversity to judges’
applicant pools and enables judges to electronically manage a large volume of applications
through search and sort features. I encourage you to use OSCAR to post your hiring
practices. To register for an OSCAR account, please visit the OSCAR registration page.


HT: Catherine Rampell

Unraveling in Belgian soccer: an under 2 year old signed to pro club's under 5 team

First, there is an "under 5 team." And that's the one that's unraveling.

20-MONTH-OLD BABY BECOMES WORLD’S YOUNGEST PRO FOOTBALLER
"Bryce Brites is only 20 months old and can’t even properly utter the words “ball” or “goal” but he just became the youngest professional football player on the planet.

This past week, Bryce signed with Belgian club FC Racing Boxberg, based near his home city of Genk, after impressing coaches with his “highly unusual” talent and “incredible” ball control. The precocious toddler was invited to train with the club’s Under-5 team and was signed and issued his very own Belgian FA membership card the very same day.

Amazingly, Bryce misses out on the all-time record for youngest-ever professional by two months. That record apparently belongs to Dutch footballer Baerke van der Meij, who signed a 10-year deal with VVV-Venlo when he was 18 months old."


HT: Juan Sebastián Pereyra Barreiro
***************

Update: videos here

Congestion in the market for law internships in Israel

Aviad Heifetz points me to an article in the Haaretz magazine, on law clerks (in Hebrew, but Google Translate makes it clear enough that they are talking about congestion (apparently after a period of unraveling): http://www.themarker.com/law/1.2151631

"The new rules stipulate that law firms will not be able to interview candidates to specialize before 15 March in the third year of undergraduate law students.

In March the new rules came into effect and the change was felt immediately. That day open all major law firms in the competition for employment outstanding students. Race interviews lasted for a few intense days. Although March 15 falls on a Friday this year many offices were assembly-line interviews and ambitious students frantically moved from office to office.

Unravelling in the Business School job market

The WSJ has a video report

Here's the caption: 

Top B-School Talent Plucked Before Class Starts

Schools try to restrict when companies can start coming to campus. But that doesn’t limit what companies try to do off-campus, and it’s not uncommon for students to show up at orientation with internship offers for next summer in hand.

HT: Jon Levin

Further unraveling of (combined) college and medical school admissions

Shenendehowa to offer early medical school acceptance

"CLIFTON PARK — A new program that may be the first of its kind in the nation will allow one medicine-minded Shenendehowa High School student to get accepted to college and medical school early — a few months before the junior prom.

"More than a year before classmates know where they’re going after graduation, one student who undergoes a rigorous application process will be accepted into Siena College’s and Albany Medical College’s combined eight-year physician program. On Thursday, officials from the school district and both colleges announced the program — “ShenNext Medicine: Selecting Tomorrow’s Doctors Today.”

"They believe the program is the first in the country to admit a student as a junior, though many institutions have partnerships that accept high school seniors to undergraduate colleges and medical schools at the same time. Siena and Albany Medical College have had such a partnership for 27 years, and Albany Med has similar programs with Union College and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

"Juniors in the Shen program still have to complete their senior year and maintain good grades."

HT: Mary O'Keeffe

An unusual law clerk hire

Not every clerk is hired without any experience other than law school. This year, one clerk, Shon Hopwood, will be showing up at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals after (not right after) a lengthy prison term for bank robbery (after which he went to law school at the University of Washington ).

Here's a blog post on it (note the date, for those of you who have been following the unravelling of the law clerk market this year. I presume that Mr Hopwood will return this Fall to his third year of law school so that he's been hired before the recently-abandoned "official" Fall dates). The URL is too nice to hide the link behind text: http://legaltimes.typepad.com/blt/2013/08/shon-hopwoods-unique-career-in-the-law-has-taken-a-dramatic-new-turn-the-onetime-jailhouse-lawyer-who-served-time-in-federal.html

AUGUST 07, 2013

Unusual Law Clerk Hire for D.C. Circuit Judge Janice Rogers Brown

Shon Hopwood's unique career in the law has taken a dramatic new turn. The onetime jailhouse lawyer who served time in federal prison for robbing banks has been hired as a 2014 law clerk for Judge Janice Rogers Brown of the prestigious U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

"I'm amazed at the opportunities and second chances I have been given," said Hopwood Wednesday after returning home to Seattle from his interview with Brown on Monday. Hopwood said the judge offered him the job soon after the interview. "I quickly said yes."

****************

Here's an August 26 story from the NY Times: Taking a Second Chance, and Running With It

Yemeni girl's speech against child marriage goes viral

Al Jazeera has the story, and the moving video, with an 11 year old girl speaking out against child marriage: Yemeni girl's speech against child marriage goes viral

Unraveling in the market for chefs?

It turns out that good restaurants need good cooks, and they are hard to find and keep in the growing market for fancy restaurants: Talent Shortage: Why New York’s Chefs Can’t Find Enough Good Cooks

Stephanie Hurder points out to me that the article hints at possible unraveling of the market:

"Another move is judging final exams at culinary schools like the International Culinary Center. If a chef sees a student whose work impresses them, they can offer the student a trailing gig — like an extended interview in the kitchen — on the spot."

2013 Best paper prize to Michael Ostrovsky and Michael Schwarz for AEJ: Micro, 2 (2), "Information Disclosure and Unraveling in Matching Markets,"

A Best Paper Prize for the matching market view of grade inflation:)

AEJ: Micro, 2 (2), "Information Disclosure and Unraveling in Matching Markets," Michael Ostrovsky and Michael Schwarz

Abstract

This paper explores information disclosure in matching markets. A school may suppress some information about students in order to improve their average job placement. We consider a setting with many schools, students, and jobs, and show that if early contracting is impossible, the same, "balanced" amount of information is disclosed in essentially all equilibria. When early contracting is allowed and information arrives gradually, if schools disclose the balanced amount of information, students and employers will not find it profitable to contract early. If they disclose more, some students and employers will prefer to sign contracts before all information is revealed. 

Unraveling Results from Comparable Demand and Supply

Here's a new old paper (written quite a while ago, but recently published...):

Niederle, Muriel, Alvin E. Roth and M. Utku Unver, “Unraveling Results from Comparable Demand and Supply: An Experimental Investigation,” Games, 2013, 4, no. 2: 243-282 (Special Issue on Games and Matching Markets), http://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/4/2/243.

Abstract: Markets sometimes unravel, with offers becoming inefficiently early. Often this is attributed to competition arising from an imbalance of demand and supply, typically excess demand for workers. However this presents a puzzle, since unraveling can only occur when firms are willing to make early offers and workers are willing to accept them. We present a model and experiment in which workers’ quality becomes known only in the late part of the market. However, in equilibrium, matching can occur (inefficiently) early only when there is comparable demand and supply: a surplus of applicants, but a shortage of high quality applicants.

More unraveling in the private equity labor market

The NY Times is on the story: A Rush to Recruit Young Analysts, Only Months on the Job

"For Wall Street’s top young analysts, landing at a prestigious investment bank out of college was the easy part. Now comes the fierce competition to line up a high-paying job at a prominent buyout fund, just months into their first professional jobs.
...
"Traditionally, these jobs do not begin immediately but a year and a half later, after analysts finish their two-year contracts.
...
"One second-year analyst at a large bank said she had hardly been exposed to working in the finance world when the rush to find a job on the “buy side” began.

“There’s a progression that people go through,” she said. “You’re two months in, you start getting calls from recruiters, and you feel left out if you’re not participating. It’s a very enticing concept to lock up a job and your ticket out of banking a year and a half out.”
...
"Because they are trying to place analysts with such little work experience, recruiters will look for anything to identify the cream of the crop. College grade-point averages, high school test scores and community service are all fair game, Ms. Morgan said.
...
"Efforts have been made to push back a process that has been inching ahead, earlier and earlier. Last year, a handful of top-flight private equity funds including Blackstone, Carlyle and Warburg Pincus tried to delay recruiting until analysts were halfway through their second year, according to multiple private equity executives.

"The larger private equity funds waited, partly in response to big banks that were cracking down on recruiting. Goldman Sachs fired analysts who conceded they had lined up new positions in their first year, and Morgan Stanley banned first-year bankers from looking for new jobs, according to executives at both banks.

“There has been backlash,” said a former Goldman Sachs analyst who went through the recruiting process three years ago and is now an associate at a midmarket private equity fund. “You don’t really want your full investment banking analyst class checking out with a year and a half left on their contracts because they know they have another job lined up.”

"The banks were not concerned about losing talent but frustrated with the conflicts of interest that emerge after analysts pledge themselves to another employer.

...

“Once you have an offer, maybe you don’t want to work late nights three, four or five nights a week,” she said. “Maybe you don’t want to hop on every single live deal.”

"Morgan Stanley has since bowed to employee complaints, lifting its ban on first-year bankers’ job hunts this spring, according to two people briefed on the decision. Morgan Stanley declined to comment.

...

"The large buyout funds began ratcheting up recruitment drives last month, once again pursuing analysts in their first year.

"The funds that agreed to wait felt they had lost top employees to hedge funds and middle-market shops that aggressively recruited first-year analysts, said a private equity executive who oversees his firm’s hiring efforts.

“It’s back to a knife fight in an alley,” the executive said. “And it’s not fair because these kids get barely any on-the-job training before a recruiter reaches out to them. We should just be recruiting these kids out of middle school. Forget high school, college and Goldman Sachs.”

HT:: Eric Budish

Fast company

Tickets For Apple’s WWDC 2013 Sell Out In Under 2 Minutes, Compared To 2 Hours In 2012

Tickets for Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer’s Conference went on sale today at 10 AM Pacific, 1 PM Eastern, and as expected, sold out in record time, at just under 2 minutes. Tickets for the developer-focused event at San Francisco’s Moscone West, which features presentations and one-on-one time with Apple’s own in-house engineers, sold out in just two hours in 2012, in under 12 hours in 2011, and in eight days in 2010.

...

This year also marks the first time Apple has provided advance notice regarding when tickets would go on sale, which almost definitely contributed to the faster-than usual sell-out this time around. Imagine a crop of millions of developers around the world hovering over their computers, waiting for the buying process to go live.

The quick sell-out is made more impressive by the fact that sales of the $1,599 tickets were limited to just one per person, and five per organization, tracked by individual Apple ID. During a previous keynote, former CEO Steve Jobs said that there were over 5,000 attendees at the show, which means that Apple potentially just made as much as $8 million in roughly 90 seconds in gross revenue from the event.

Apple’s developer economy is now a massive industry, having paid out $9 billion in total to developers, at a rate now of around $1 billion per quarter. Both iPhone and iPad audiences continue to grow, and Apple’s tablet especially showed tremendous progress during Apple’s most recent fiscal quarter. While Mac sales seem to be either flat or on the decline, the global growth of the iOS user pool more than makes up for that, and iOS as a platform is still the primary revenue driver when it comes to mobile apps and advertising. Combined, those factors mean interest in tickets for WWDC isn’t likely to flag anytime soon.

 HT: Joshua Gans

Clerkship hiring: early, and concentrated at top schools...

Above the Law reports on Which Law Schools Had the Most Clerkship Placements? and
Clerkship Hiring Is Getting Earlier and Earlier

Here's a quick look at which schools are doing well at placing students into clerkships...


 As for earlier and earlier hiring following the recent abandonment of the most recent timetable by the DC Circuit, here are two announcement over at OSCAR (the Online System for Clerkship Application and Review):

Latest OSCAR News

RSS

Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan Date Change

Apr 10, 2013 4:30 pm

The OSCAR system will release all online third-year law school student applications on June 28, 2013 at 12:00 pm Noon (EDT).

OSCAR Version 7: Limit of 100 Clerkship Applications

Apr 08, 2013 11:10 am

To address judge concerns, Version 7 introduces a 100-application limit per applicant for clerkship applications.

As it happens, a new model of unraveling of markets just came by email:
 STRATEGIC UNCERTAINTY AND UNRAVELING IN MATCHING
MARKETS, by FEDERICO ECHENIQUE AND JUAN SEBASTIAN PEREYRA

From their introduction:
"Strategic unraveling in our model proceeds as follows. There is a loss in efficiency when some agents go early: Information about the quality of the matches arrives late, so it is better for efficiency to wait until the information has arrived to make a match. If some agents go early anyway, this forces later matches to be less efficient. The result is a negative externality that makes it more tempting for all agents to go early. It may push some additional agents over the threshold by which they decide to go early. In turn, these additional agents going early makes it even more tempting to go early|and so on and so forth."

Child rearing by queuing

In New York City, many of the good things in life for children are rationed by queue: Born to Wait: 
For City Parents, a Waiting List for Nearly Everything

"The first parent lined up at 4 a.m. on a Sunday..

"Twenty minutes later, other parents showed up and a line began to form down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. One father kept a list so that anyone searching for a thawing hot coffee could do so without losing a place in the line. He abandoned that project as more and more people trickled in and the end of the line was no longer visible from the front...

"If waiting in line in the predawn of a January morning for science camp registration sounds crazy, you do not have a New York City child born after 2004. For those children and their parents, especially in the neighborhoods of brownstone Brooklyn, Lower Manhattan and the Upper West Side, not getting into activities, classes, sports teams — and even local schools — has become a way of life.
...
"Havona Madama’s fear of waiting lists led her to start a database to track her 5-year-old daughter’s favorite classes and their registration deadlines. Two years ago, she decided to leave her law practice to turn her research intoKidKlass.com, a hub of information for brownstone Brooklyn about classes, camps and all-important registration dates. The site is still being developed, but she counts 50 to 100 visitors a day who peruse the listings. Still to come, she said, is an “alert” system to let parents know what deadlines they are about to miss.
...
"Technology has fueled the phenomenon. In 2012, the city moved to online registration for its free summer swim classes at its outdoor pools. The number of applicants jumped to 34,134, from 20,393 in 2011, when officials began to introduce the online application. (That year, four pools still required on-site, in-person registration. Most people got in.) Last summer, only 24,532 applications got spots.

"Often, the activities that fill up fastest are the ones that are most affordable and most accessible, like the swim classes. At the Brooklyn Public Library in Bay Ridge, 25 children can be accommodated at the free story-time sessions. Parents and other caregivers routinely show up when the library opens at 10 a.m. to get a ticket for the 10:30 a.m. story times on Mondays and Wednesdays. On a recent Wednesday, tickets were snatched up within five minutes.

"For children, waiting on a list for soccer or missing story time might not be a tragedy, but for parents, winding up on a list can mean having to put life on pause. In the Brooklyn line for science camp, the parents talked about how getting a spot could determine whether they could go to work on particular days, or whether they would have to spend extra money on a baby sitter.
...
'“It’s just a fact of living in the city,” Ms. Flattery said. She has learned not to discuss classes with her children until it is certain they will get in. She also follows a strategy that may add to the waiting lists. “You fill up every class you can, and you drop if you don’t need it. Everyone overschedules — it’s the only route to choice,” she said.

Unraveling in Israel: CPAs and law grads

Ran Shorrer sends me an email about the hiring of CPA's in Israel, in an article (in Hebrew) that also touches on law firm hiring.  He writes:

"google translate with modifications (just to make it readable):

 The race to specialize will only start in CPA third year

The Board of Auditors shall recommend to the Ministry of Justice about a revolution in the management of specialization: accounting firms will not recruit interns until the end of their studies, students can choose to specialize in a greater number of enterprises and public institutions

Hadar Buy

the Board of Auditors decided to make a recommendation to the Minister of Justice correction accounting regulations regarding the regulation of the interviews and the acceptance of accounting students in their apprenticeship and the places who are entitled to receive specialized profession.

the Council auditors explains that the move is designed to create a uniform date for interns, similar to the one recently set by the Bar Association.

Choose to specialize without academic data

In August 2010, the Minister of Justice Yaakov Neeman signed on an amendment according to which law firms will not be allowed to interview candidates before March  in their third year of study.

Today, the accounting industry is not regulated, and specialized ministries begin recruiting the first year of their studies, making it difficult for firms to learn the capabilities of each student, and students themselves should decide on a specialty before managed to find out what interests them in their studies.

Dr. Hadas Glndr, head of the Department of Accounting at the College of Management, initiated the initial appeal to the Minister of Justice, said to Calcalist that the appeal to students in the first year due to the wish of firms to receive the best students at an early stage because of the competition between them.

 "There is no  academic data at this stage, so accounting firms hire testing services that will help them find qualified interns. Proposed regulation will determine to choose only the third year students not only designed to help firms but also for students in their third year and more unified in terms of their aspirations for the profession."

If the Minister of Justice approves the proposal of the Board of Auditors, the regulation will apply to candidates who began their studies in the school year following approval of the regulations."

The D.C. Circuit Rules that the Law Clerk Hiring Plan is History

Notice Regarding Law Clerk Hiring By D.C. Circuit Judges for the 2014-2015 Term

Although the judges of this circuit would uniformly prefer to continue hiring law clerks pursuant to the Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan, it has become apparent that the plan is no longer working. Because participation in the plan is voluntary, a significant percentage of all United States circuit judges must agree to follow it if it is to work appropriately. During the past few years, a significant and increasing number of circuit judges around the country have hired in advance of the plan’s interview and offer dates, and it is likely that they will continue to do so. As a result, continued adherence to the plan is no longer fair and equitable to either students or judges.

We stand ready to work with the judges of the other circuits to develop an appropriate successor to the current plan. In the meantime, however, the judges of this circuit will hire law clerks at such times as each individual judge determines to be appropriate. We have agreed that none of us will give “exploding offers,” that is, offers that expire if not accepted immediately. Rather, when a judge of this circuit gives a candidate an offer, the candidate will have a reasonable time to consider the offer and interview with other judges before accepting or declining. Additional practices applicable to individual judges may be found on the judges’ OSCAR pages.

• Online System for Clerkship Application and Review (OSCAR)

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See these previous posts for an account of its (unexpectedly long) death throes: http://marketdesigner.blogspot.com/search/label/clerks