Preference signaling in the Political Science job market

 There is now signaling in the Political Science job market:  They allow job candidates to send up to three signals: here's the APSA's page with frequently asked questions about signaling.

Aside from the procedures APSA members should use, their site offers some general comments about signaling. Some excerpts:

What is the history of signaling as applied to specialized labor markets like that for political science PhDs?

 The American Economics Association (AEA) Ad Hoc Committee on the Job Market, including Roth, applied his research to the economics PhDs job market over 15 years ago. Since the 1970s, the job market for economists has been organized around the AEA and related associations’ annual meeting (called the Allied Social Sciences Associations, or the “ASSA”) in January and since 2006, economists have utilized signaling for job interviews that take place at the ASSA. For those who don’t secure a position there, a job “scramble” that is more public takes place later in the spring. These events act as clearinghouses to clear congestion resulting from candidates applying for almost all positions due to their need to secure a position, and also prevents “unraveling,” where employers make offers earlier and earlier each year to get the best possible candidate they can.[1] The AEA Ad Hoc Committee on the Job Market offers detailed advice on signaling for (economics) PhDs going on the job market here.

Why would the political science job market benefit from signaling?

The number of political science job postings per PhD on the job market has decreased considerably since 2011, when there were two job openings for each candidate as it recovered from the Great Recession.[1] After the COVID pandemic, the higher education job market seems to be showing signs that it is recovering more slowly, and political science is no exception to this trend. The behavior of the higher education job markets runs counter to the general labor market trend in the US where jobs are currently outnumbering jobseekers.[2]  Currently there are almost two candidates per job opening on APSA eJobs.[3] The political science job market is also congested in 2023. In the last few years, candidates have reported applying for upwards of 25-50, more than 51, or more than 100 positions in a job market cycle, making the possibilities for matches endless.[4]

After the job market at APSA’s Annual Meeting in September, the job market for political science PhDs is decentralized and thin, lacking a centralizing timeframe, location, or deadline, with the only way for candidates to let employers know they are interested is to contact the hiring committee or send in an application for the position. Jobs are being posted earlier each year to secure the best candidates by utilizing the APSA Annual Meeting as a job market clearinghouse. For the remainder of the academic year, those participating in the job market lack any kind of intentionally designed mechanism to structure their path to a job placement before the next academic year..[5] For all these reasons: a surplus of jobseekers, market congestion (applying to all jobs), market unraveling (earlier and earlier offers), the political science job market would benefit from being approached with the market design tools that have been shown to alleviate these inefficiencies.

Citations

How will signaling benefit candidates and employers at APSA Annual Meeting/ Interview Services?

 Due to job market congestion, the job market centralized around the APSA Annual Meeting/ Interview Services would benefit from a mechanism for candidates and employers to be able to decipher meaningful interest more easily from candidates for positions, and to allow institutions to view candidates more equally across characteristics outside of institutional prestige, rank, or publication records. Due to the large number of candidates relative to jobs, we believe signaling can increase the number of matches facilitated, decrease the number of applications both written and submitted by candidates and reviewed by hiring committees, and decrease the stress of all participants in the market. We have created a pilot program to beta test how signaling will work for employers and candidates utilizing Interview Services at the Annual Meeting.

The Path to a Match for Interventional Cardiology Fellowships

The Society for Cardiovascular Angiography & Interventions has started a fellowship match, and here's an article describing the familiar marketplace failure that led to that decision, involving unraveling of application, interview and appointment dates, with the resulting congestion and exploding offers, and the process of reaching sufficient consensus to move to a centralized match ( to be run by the NRMP).

The Path to a Match for Interventional Cardiology Fellowship: A Major SCAI Initiative  by Douglas E. Drachman MD, FSCAI (Chair) a, Tayo Addo MD b, Robert J. Applegate MD, MSCAI c, Robert C. Bartel MSc, CAE d, Anna E. Bortnick MD, PhD, MSc, FSCAI e, Francesca M. Dea d, Tarek Helmy MD, MSCAI f, Timothy D. Henry MD, MSCAI g, Adnan Khalif MD, FSCAI h, Ajay J. Kirtane MD, SM, FSCAI i, Michael Levy MD, MPH, FSCAI j, Michael J. Lim MD, MSCAI k, Ehtisham Mahmud MD, MSCAI l, Nino Mihatov MD, FSCAI m, Sahil A. Parikh MD, FSCAI i, Laura Porter CMP d, Abhiram Prasad MD n, Sunil V. Rao MD, FSCAI o, Louai Razzouk MD, MPH, FSCAI o, Samit Shah MD, PhD, FSCAI p, Adhir Shroff MD, MPH, FSCAI q, Jacqueline E. Tamis-Holland MD, FSCAI r, Poonam Velagapudi MD, FSCAI s, Fredrick G. Welt MD, FSCAI t, J. Dawn Abbott MD, FSCAI (Co-Chair), Journal of the Society for Cardiovascular Angiography & Interventions, in press.

"Abstract: The field of interventional cardiology (IC) has evolved dramatically over the past 40 years. Training and certification in IC have kept pace, with the development of accredited IC fellowship training programs, training statements, and subspecialty board certification. The application process, however, remained fragmented with lack of a universal process or time frame. In recent years, growing competition among training programs for the strongest candidates resulted in time-limited offers and high-pressure situations that disadvantaged candidates. A grassroots effort was recently undertaken by a Society for Cardiovascular Angiography & Interventions task force, to create equity in the system by establishing a national Match for IC fellowship. This manuscript explores the rationale, process, and implications of this endeavor."

"over the past several years program directors and candidates found that the process has devolved, with wide variation in application timelines and on-the-spot offers, which disadvantage candidates and programs looking to interview a range of applicants.

"The pressures and unfair features of the existing system were further fueled by the transition to virtual interviews related to the COVID-19 pandemic. With logistics of travel no longer a consideration, programs could commence interviews nearly immediately after the applications became available. This led to more candidates being interviewed in rapid succession, and a system evolved in which programs quickly assessed candidates, offered positions, and applied pressure for candidates to accept offers or be passed over for other candidates.

"In response to the shortcomings of the current system, members of Society for Cardiovascular Angiography & Interventions (SCAI) were inspired to lead a grassroots educational campaign to organize IC program directors and the broader interventional community to commit to a regulated “Match” process under the established National Resident Match Program (NRMP). This manuscript provides an account of how this process unfolded and how a Match for IC fellowship was ultimately created.

...

"From the applicant’s perspective, the lack of a structured timeline for the application process required candidates to make career decisions early in the first year of cardiovascular disease training and to compose their application materials 2 years in advance of starting IC training. With ERAS open to application submission in the fall of the second year for the December release to programs, fellows had limited time on clinical rotations to determine their interest and aptitude for IC. Additionally, letters of recommendation, written at this early stage, risked not being fully reflective of each candidate’s capacity to improve and develop the technical skills and clinical knowledge important for success in the field. There were other disadvantages to candidates in the existing system. Fellows at programs with an IC fellowship had an advantage of securing an internal spot but were often pressured to limit their exploration of the opportunities at other programs, potentially disadvantaging them in the long term.

"Another problem with the existing system was that the pressure to recruit candidates on a tight timeline limited the opportunity to interview applicants from a wide variety and diversity of programs, potentially reducing the ability to recruit underrepresented candidates from varied programs. Despite an overall increase in the diversity of physicians entering the workforce,11 there has been little change in the applicant pool for IC over the years, with fewer than 5% of applicants self-reporting as Black race or Hispanic ethnicity and only 10% identifying as women.12

"Competition among the programs, each vying for the seemingly strongest candidates, degenerated into a system that favored quick decision-making on the part of programs to offer positions as early as possible. The influence of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 negatively impacted an already high-pressure application process, compounding its many weaknesses.13 Fellowship interviews were hosted virtually rather than in person, which enabled candidates to interview at a greater number of programs without the need to travel. In addition, the virtual format accelerated the tempo of an application process that was already felt to be too fast, resulting in an increase in so-called “exploding offers”—offers that required the accepted candidate to respond within a very short timeframe or risk losing the offer. This practice placed significant pressure on candidates to make quick decisions, often forcing them to determine whether to accept the offer from 1 institution before having the opportunity to participate in interviews with—let alone see and evaluate—other programs or fully understand the ramifications of accepting an offer on their personal lives. At the same time, the accelerated timetable left many programs scrambling to identify applicants, as the number of available candidates diminished rapidly due to applicants accepting time-sensitive, exploding offers.

...

"As with other national efforts of this magnitude, the path to develop consensus in favor of a Match was not without challenges. There were several program directors around the country who strongly opposed the institution of a Match. These were well-regarded academicians and clinician educators who expressed very sincere concerns about the impact on fellows in their programs. The members of the SCAI Match Task Force addressed as many concerns as possible, providing the information necessary for each program director to make the best decision for their institution. A minority of program directors remained opposed to the initiative or did not engage with Task Force members despite multiple attempts to be contacted.

"The Match campaign proved highly effective, and by November 2022, the 75% threshold of programs and positions to implement the Match was met

...

"As the sponsor of the Match, SCAI considered the pros and cons of the “All In Policy,” where registered programs must attempt to fill all ACGME positions at the program through the Match.15,16 SCAI opted out of the “All In Policy” to allow programs to have flexibility for unique situations that require commitment to a candidate outside of the Match. 

...

"As a result of the successful implementation of the Match in IC, the first Match cycle for incoming IC fellows will open in the summer of 2024. Individuals eligible to apply include cardiovascular disease fellows in their third or final year of training and graduates who have completed fellowship and are in clinical practice. This class will start IC training in July 2025"

Matching and market design in the latest GEB (stack overflow...)

 The current (January 2024) issue of Games and Economic Behavior presents an increasingly common dilemma (faced by scholars in burgeoning fields, and maybe by aging scholars...). Papers I should read are being written much faster than I can read them.

Here are 9 papers in that issue that are pretty clearly about matching and market design (which leaves out some papers on auctions and one on unraveling of the timing of markets) :

1. Obvious manipulations of tops-only voting rules

   R. Pablo Arribillaga, Agustín G. Bonifacio

   Pages 12-24

   View PDF

2. select article Rejection-proof mechanisms for multi-agent kidney exchange

   Research articleOpen access

   Rejection-proof mechanisms for multi-agent kidney exchange

   Danny Blom, Bart Smeulders, Frits Spieksma

   Pages 25-50

   View PDF

3. 1. Designing rotation programs: Limits and possibilities

      Ville Korpela, Michele Lombardi, Riccardo D. Saulle

      Pages 77-102

      View PDF

   2. select article School choice with transferable student characteristics

      Research articleOpen access

      School choice with transferable student characteristics

      Carmelo Rodríguez-Álvarez, Antonio Romero-Medina

      Pages 103-124

      View PDF

      Auction timing and market thickness

      Isaías N. Chaves, Shota Ichihashi

      Pages 161-178

      View PDF

      
      

      1. School choice with costly information acquisition

         Tyler Maxey

         Pages 248-268

         View PDF

      2. select article Singles monotonicity and stability in one-to-one matching problems

         Research articleOpen access

         Singles monotonicity and stability in one-to-one matching problems

         Yoichi Kasajima, Manabu Toda

         Pages 269-286

         View PDF

      3. select article Reallocation with priorities

         Research articleFull text access

         Reallocation with priorities

         Julien Combe, Jan Christoph Schlegel

         Pages 287-299

         View PDF

         
         

         Coalitional stability in matching problems with externalities and random preferences

         Adriana Piazza, Juan Pablo Torres-Martínez

         Pages 321-339

         View PDF

Talent wars in private equity: continued unraveling

 The WSJ has the latest:

Hectic Private-Equity Recruitment Process Leaves Firms Looking for Alternatives. July talent-grab leaves some firms frustrated with process for hiring entry-level workers. by Chris Cumming, Aug. 30, 2023

"Private-equity firms are recruiting workers with less and less Wall Street experience every year, hoping to beat out their competitors to hire the most impressive recent college graduates. 

...

"Over about 48 hours every year, hundreds of first-year investment bankers file through private-equity offices for a battery of interviews and tests, hoping to land an offer in one of the world’s most highly paid industries.

...

"This year’s recruitment process kicked off July 21—the earliest date ever—for positions starting in 2025. Firms hired candidates who have mostly just graduated from college and are beginning two-year bank-analyst programs, making offers that kick in after their programs end.

HT: Isaac Sorkin

Transition from medical school to residency: defending the parts that work well (namely the NRMP Resident Match)

This post is about a recently published paper concerning the design of the market for new doctors in the U.S.  But it will require some background for most readers of this blog.   The short summary is that the market is experiencing problems related to congestion, and one of the proposals to address these problems was deeply flawed, and would have reduced market thickness and caused substantial direct harm to participants if implemented, and created instabilities that would likely have caused indirect harms to the match process in subsequent years. But this needed to be explained in the medical community, since that proposal was being  very actively advocated.

For those of you already steeped in the background, you can go straight to the paper, here.

Itai Ashlagi, Ephy Love, Jason I. Reminick, Alvin E. Roth; Early vs Single Match in the Transition to Residency: Analysis Using NRMP Data From 2014 to 2021. J Grad Med Educ 1 April 2023; 15 (2): 219–227. doi: https://doi.org/10.4300/JGME-D-22-00177.1

If the title doesn't remind you of the vigorous advocacy for an early match for select positions, here is some of the relevant back story.

The market for new doctors--i.e. the transition from medical school to residency--is experiencing growing pains as the number of applications and interviews has grown, which imposes costs on both applicants and residency programs.  

Below is a schematic of that process, which begins with applicants submitting applications electronically, which makes it easy to submit many.  This is followed by residency programs inviting some of their applicants to interview. The movement to Zoom interviews has made it easier to have many interviews also (although interviews were multiplying even before they moved to Zoom).  

After interviews, programs and applicants participate in the famous centralized clearinghouse called The Match, run by the NRMP. Programs and applicants each submit rank order lists (ROLs) ranking those with whom they interviewed, and a deferred acceptance algorithm (the Roth-Peranson algorithm) produces a stable matching, which is publicly announced on Match Day. (Unmatched people and positions are invited into a now computer-mediated scramble, called SOAP, and these matches too are announced on Match  Day.)

The Match had its origins as a way to control the "unraveling" of the market into inefficient bilateral contracts, in which employment contracts were made long before employment would commence, via exploding offers that left most applicants with very little ability to compare options.  This kind of market failure afflicted not only the market for new physicians (residents), but also the market for later specialization (as fellows). Consequently, over the years, many specialties have turned to matching for their fellowship positions as well.

  The boxes in brown in the schematic are those that constitute "The Match:" the formulation and submission of the ROLs, and the processing of these into a stable matching of programs to residents.  Congestion is bedeviling the parts in blue.

The boxes colored brown are 'The Match' in which participants formulate and submit rank order lists (ROLs), after which a deferred acceptance algorithm produces a stable matching of applicants to programs, which is accepted by programs and applicants on Match Day. The boxes in blue, the applications and interviews that precede the Match, are presently suffering from some congestion.  Some specialties have been experimenting with signals (loosely modeled on those in the market for new Economics PhDs, but implemented differently by different medical specialties).

The proposal in question was to divide the match into two matches, run sequentially, with the first match only allowing half of the available positions to be filled.  The particular proposal was to do this first for the OB-GYN specialty, thus separating that from the other specialties in an early match, with only half of the OB-GYN positions available early.

This proposal came out of a study funded by the American Medical Association, and it was claimed, without any evidence being offered, that it would solve the current problems facing the transition to residency.  Our paper was written to provide some evidence of the likely effects, by simulating the proposed process using the preferences (ROLs) submitted in previous years.  

The results show that the proposal would largely harm OB-GYN applicants by giving them less preferred positions than they could get in a traditional single match, and that it would create instabilities that would encourage strategic behavior that would likely undermine the successful operation of the match in subsequent years.

Itai Ashlagi, Ephy Love, Jason I. Reminick, Alvin E. Roth; Early vs Single Match in the Transition to Residency: Analysis Using NRMP Data From 2014 to 2021. J Grad Med Educ 1 April 2023; 15 (2): 219–227. doi: https://doi.org/10.4300/JGME-D-22-00177.1

Abstract:

"Background--An Early Result Acceptance Program (ERAP) has been proposed for obstetrics and gynecology (OB/GYN) to address challenges in the transition to residency. However, there are no available data-driven analyses on the effects of ERAP on the residency transition.

"Objective--We used National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) data to simulate the outcomes of ERAP and compare those to what occurred in the Match historically.

"Methods--We simulated ERAP outcomes in OB/GYN, using the de-identified applicant and program rank order lists from 2014 to 2021, and compared them to the actual NRMP Match outcomes. We report outcomes and sensitivity analyses and consider likely behavioral adaptations.

"Results--Fourteen percent of applicants receive a less preferred match under ERAP, while only 8% of applicants receive a more preferred match. Less preferred matches disproportionately affect DOs and international medical graduates (IMGs) compared to US MD seniors. Forty-one percent of programs fill with more preferred sets of applicants, while 24% fill with less preferred sets of applicants. Twelve percent of applicants and 52% of programs are in mutually dissatisfied applicant-program pairs (a pair in which both prefer each other to the match each received). Seventy percent of applicants who receive less preferred matches are part of a mutually dissatisfied pair. In 75% of programs with more preferred outcomes, at least one assigned applicant is part of a mutually dissatisfied pair.

"Conclusions--In this simulation, ERAP fills most OB/GYN positions, but many applicants and programs receive less preferred matches, and disparities increase for DOs and IMGs. ERAP creates mutually dissatisfied applicant-program pairs and problems for mixed-specialty couples, which provides incentives for gamesmanship."

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

I'm hopeful this paper will effectively contribute to the ongoing discussion of how, and how not, to modify the design of the whole process of transition to residency with an aim to fixing the parts that need fixing, without damaging the parts that work well, i.e. while doing no harm. 

(Signaling will likely continue to play a role in this.)

Unraveling of the private equity labor market, continued (and continuing)

 Here's some news and history on the

Private Equity On-Cycle Recruiting Timeline

by Matt Ting (Peak Frameworks)

"The sheer absurdity of the private equity recruiting process is perhaps best illustrated by the recruiting timeline.

"In recent years, private equity recruiting has kicked off within months of people graduating. Private equity firms commonly interview and hire people that have fewer than 6 months of work experience. And the thing is, private equity firms are hiring people who won’t actually start their jobs for another 2 years.

"Over a decade ago, recruiting occurred only 1 year in advance. This gave analysts much more time to do actual deals, technically prepare, and thoughtfully decide if they wanted to recruit for private equity.

"Every single year, the recruiting timeline inches forward by a month or so. There was a brief stretch for the 2012 – 2016 associate classes where the start time held relatively constant at around 1.5 years in advance.

"Over the past five years, the recruiting timeline has consistently moved up a month or two at a time. Every single year, many firms get caught off-guard or unprepared because of how accelerated things have become. It’s at the point where it seems like there’s no further it can move forward.

"The only time over the last 15 years that recruiting has moved backwards in time was during the Great Recession (recruiting during July 2009). And even then, recruiting only moved back by a couple of months."

HT: Mike Ostrovsky