NY Times debate: Is Prostitution Safer when It's Legal?

The debate Is Prostitution Safer When It’s Legal? mirrors in many ways the debate over whether legalizing compensation for kidney donors (and bone marrow donors, etc.) would be better or worse than the illegal markets that currently exist...

DEBATERS

• 

  Labor Laws, Not Criminal Laws, Are the Solution

  CAROL LEIGH, BAY AREA SEX WORKERS ADVOCACY NETWORK
• 

  Legality Leads to More Trafficking

  RACHEL LLOYD, AUTHOR, "GIRLS LIKE US"
• 

  Criminalize Only the Buying of Sex

  MAX WALTMAN, UNIVERSITY OF STOCKHOLM
• 

  Ignore the Stigma and Focus on the Need

  MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
• 

  Nevada’s Legal Brothels Make Workers Feel Safer

  BARBARA G. BRENTS, UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA, LAS VEGAS
• 

  Legality Brings Protection and Better Care

  CHIKA UNIGWE, AUTHOR, "ON BLACK SISTERS STREET"
• 

  Such Oppression Can Never Be Safe

  NORMA RAMOS, COALITION AGAINST TRAFFICKING IN WOMEN

INTRODUCTION

Jim Wilson/The New York TimesProstitutes wait for customers at a legal brothel in Nevada.

Some say laws against prostitution unfairly victimize women. A Canadian court recently ruled that laws preventing brothels endangered prostitutes by forcing them to work on the streets. And as the recent Secret Service scandal makes clear, in Colombia, prostitution is legal in “tolerance zones.” But in Spain, prostitution is essentially legal, and the nation has become a magnet for sex trafficking. Can legalized prostitution ever be safe and free of exploitation? Or should laws against prostitution remain?

Maryland courts: same sex divorce isn't repugnant, even if marriage is

Two weeks ago I reported on the Maryland court case about whether a same sex couple who got married in California could divorce in Maryland. Here's the news from the court's decision yesterday: Maryland’s high court allows same-sex divorce.

"Maryland’s highest court decided Friday that even though same-sex couples aren’t yet able to marry in the state, they do have the right to divorce.


"The Court of Appeals unanimously overturned the lower court, ruling that “a valid out-of-state same-sex marriage should be treated by Maryland courts as worthy of divorce.”

"The team of lawyers representing the women argued that Maryland has always recognized out-of-jurisdiction marriages — even in cases that are expressly illegal in the state, such as uncle-niece marriages. “We felt pretty confident that this case would be treated no differently,” Zavos said.

"The appellate court agreed, finding that the parties’ same-sex marriage is not “repugnant” to Maryland “public policy,” the bar it would have to reach for the couple to be legally turned away for a divorce. The seven judges didn’t miss the opportunity in the opinion to take a jab at the Maryland General Assembly, saying that to date, its treatment of same-sex relationships might “be characterized as a case of multiple personality disorder.”

"In March, Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) signed a bill legalizing same-sex marriage. The law is slated to take effect in January but faces a potential roadblock in November when a measure to repeal the legislation will appear on the ballot.

Comparing countries through their universities

Comparing universities is hard enough, and it's harder if they are in different countries, so imagine the caveats that must accompany the attempt by Universitas 21 to create a ranking of national systems of higher education.

But it would be boring to start there, so here's their ranking:

1 United  States
 2 Sweden
 3 Canada
 4 Finland
 5 Denmark
 6 Switzerland
 7 Norway
 8 Australia
 9 Netherlands
 10 United  Kingdom
 11 Singapore
 12 Austria
 13 Belgium
 14 New Zealand
 15 France
 16 Ireland
 17 Germany
 18 Hong Kong SAR
 19 Israel
 20 Japan
 21 Taiwan
 22 Korea
 23 Portugal
 24 Spain
 25 Ukraine
...
There are of course lots of ways to parse the data, here are some:

"Government funding of higher education as a percentage of GDP is highest in Finland, Norway and Denmark, but when private expenditure is added in, funding is highest in the United States, Korea, Canada and Chile. Investment in Research and Development is highest in Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland. The United States dominates the total output of research journal articles, but Sweden is the biggest producer of articles per head of population. The nations whose research has the greatest impact are Switzerland, the Netherlands, the United States, United Kingdom and Denmark. While the United States and United Kingdom have the world's top institutions in rankings, the depth of world class higher education institutions per head of population is best in Switzerland, Sweden, Israel and Denmark.

"The highest participation rates in higher education are in Korea, Finland, Greece, the United States, Canada and Slovenia. The countries with the largest proportion of workers with a higher level education are Russia, Canada, Israel, United States, Ukraine, Taiwan and Australia. Finland, Denmark, Singapore, Norway and Japan have the highest ratio of researchers in the economy.

"International students form the highest proportions of total student numbers in Australia, Singapore, Austria, United Kingdom and Switzerland. International research collaboration is most prominent in Indonesia, Switzerland, Hong Kong SAR, Denmark, Belgium and Austria. China, India, Japan and the United States rank in the bottom 25 percent of countries for international research collaboration. In all but eight countries at least 50 percent of students were female, the lowest being in India and Korea. In only five countries were there at least 50 percent female staff; the lowest being in Japan and Iran."

Here are some of my earlier posts on universities.

Why are there (still) fewer women professors than men?

A study of chemistry Ph.D. students in Britain reveals that academic careers start looking disproportionately unattractive to women compared to men as they progress through their studies. It appears that Ph.D. supervisors are largely to blame.


Here's a succinct summary: Why Women Leave Academia
"Young women scientists leave academia in far greater numbers than men for three reasons. During their time as Ph.D. candidates, large numbers of women conclude that (i) the characteristics of academic careers are unappealing, (ii) the impediments they will encounter are disproportionate, and (iii) the sacrifices they will have to make are great."


And here's the report, and its executive summary:

The chemistry PhD: the impact on women’s retention
A report prepared by Jessica Lober Newsome for the UK Resource Centre for Women in SET and the Royal Society of Chemistry


Executive Summary and Key Findings
This research attempted to establish what accounts for the findings of a RSC survey of the career intentions
of chemistry PhD students (RSC, 2008). It was a qualitative study which aimed to pin point the factors that
discourage women more than men from planning a career in research, especially in academia.

81 chemists, via eight focus groups (six with second year students, two with third year students) and 47 telephone interviews (23 with third year students and 24 with people who had recently completed a chemistry PhD programme) participated in the research.

The research identified that the following factors, which relate to the doctoral study experience, and deter a larger proportion of women than men from remaining in research beyond their PhD.

During doctoral study, a larger proportion of female than male participants had:

 Been deeply affected by what might be termed ‘standard supervision issues’ (e.g. enjoying little pastoral care and having to cope with a supervisor who lacks interpersonal/management skills);
 Encountered significant supervision issues, which they felt powerless to resolve;
 Experienced a lack of integration with their research group, isolation and exclusion (and more rarely,
bullying);
 Been uncomfortable with the culture of their research group (about working patterns, time and
expectations and the level of competition between group members), especially where the culture was
particularly ‘macho’;
 Developed concerns about poor (though normal) experimental success rates, apprehensive of what this may infer to others about their skills and competence;
 Formed the impression that the doctoral research process is an ordeal filled with frustration, pressure and stress, which a career in research would only prolong; rather than short-term pain for long-term gain.


The research suggested that where women do not wish to pursue an academic career, this is because they perceived the rewards on offer insufficient to overcome the challenge and compromise entailed.

In contrast to male participants, female participants had:

 Come to view academic careers as too all-consuming, too solitary and not sufficiently collaborative;
 Come to the conclusion that the short-term contract aspect of post-docing could not be reconciled with other aspects of their life, particularly relationships and family;
 Come to believe the competition for a permanent academic post was too fierce for them to compete successfully;
 Come to believe they would need to make sacrifices (about femininity and motherhood) in order to succeed in academia;
 Been advised in negative terms of the challenge they would face (by virtue of their gender).

The report concludes that the chemistry PhD programme and academic careers are modelled on masculine
ways of thinking and doing, which leaves women neither supported as PhD students nor enthused to remain in research in the longer term. Cultural as well as procedural change is required to address this.
********

In Economics, there are still fewer women full professors than men, although there are signs of change. Here's a story that takes note of the fact that three recent winners of the Clark medal are the mothers of young children...  Women making gains in economics, but progress is slow

The handover of power in France

Signs of the times: Hollande Sworn In as President of France

"Mr. Hollande, the seventh president of the Fifth Republic, was accompanied by his partner, Valérie Trierweiler; they will be the first unmarried couple to represent France.

"Mr. Hollande entered the Élysée along a long red carpet in the courtyard, met by Nicolas Sarkozy, who was the first incumbent president to lose re-election since 1981. Both men, in dark suits, shook hands and disappeared inside for a meeting, in which, it is said, Mr. Sarkozy handed over France’s nuclear codes to his successor. Some suggested he also handed over the password to the Élysée Twitter account

In 100 years (my predictions)

Ignacio Palacios-Huerta is editing a volume, In 100 Years, inspired by Keynes' 1930 essay, "Economic Possibilities of our Grandchildren."

Here is my contribution: In 100 Years, and its opening and concluding paragraphs (to tempt you to read the paragraphs in between, or to save you the trouble...).

"For those of you reading this in 2112, let me introduce myself by saying that in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries I studied the design of matching markets, which are markets in which price alone doesn’t clear the market, and so participants can’t just choose what they want (even if they can afford it), they also have to be chosen. These are markets that involve application or selection processes or other forms of courtship. Matching markets determine some of the most important events of our lives: where we go to school, who we marry, what jobs we get, even whether we get a lifesaving organ for transplant if we should happen to need one (see Roth 2002, 2008 for overviews). So I’ll concentrate my predictions on these things, namely schools, jobs, marriage and family, and medicine, along with some thoughts about the possible state of economic expertise, i.e. the things that economists produce and sell. 
...
"I’ve also spent some time studying how some kinds of transactions are regarded as repugnant, in some times and places, and how this constrains what markets we see... 

...
...
...

"To summarize the predictions I’ve made here about 100 years from now, I think that the trend of increasing prosperity will continue, but that it will not necessarily (as Keynes predicted in 1930) bring us all lives of leisure.  Many will work harder than ever, and some of the things some of us will do to work more efficiently—like taking performance enhancing drugs--will go from being repugnant today to ordinary in the future. Other things we do eagerly today, like use computers for access to more and more data, may become repugnant in some respects, as privacy of personal data moves to the forefront of civil rights issues. And while medical advances will continue on all fronts, and advances in preventive medicine will make medical care and long-lived good health more widely available, some kinds of medicine, including reproductive medicine along with other aspects of reproduction, will become commoditized, while others, such as genetic manipulation of various sorts, may become repugnant. Some kinds of education will become commoditized, but among the matching markets that we see today, selective admissions to elite universities will remain, as will networking and matchmaking for family formation (under a wider variety of marital forms) and perhaps increasingly, for research collaborators and other kinds of business partners.  And there will still be economists, and economic mysteries to unravel, including those that will arise from the increased computerization of markets and marketplaces. Much of market design that we struggle to understand today will have become commoditized and be found in off the shelf software, but understanding how to design novel markets and fix market failures will remain an active concern of our economist grandchildren.

"Keynes, in writing about the future of economics, said “If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people, on a level with dentists, that would be splendid!” Perhaps if we replace “dentists” with “engineers,” that is still a good goal for the next hundred years."

More on the market for economists: Harvard matters

David Warsh discusses comings and goings at Harvard's Economics department, with particular attention to economic history: History Matters

Mother's Day unraveling

HT: Joshua Gans

Bone marrow registries

The NY Times reports on an effort to start a bone marrow registry in Nigeria, and to increase donation among African Americans: Finding a Match, and a Mission: Helping Blacks Survive Cancer

"Now he is trying to repay that debt, with an effort that experts say may save the lives of both Nigerians and black Americans. In February, he helped start Nigeria’s national bone-marrow registry, the first in Africa outside South Africa. He is now raising money to start a cord-blood bank there.

Millions of Nigerians have blood cancers like leukemia or lymphoma, and about 4,000 black Americans die annually of them. Less than 20 percent of black Americans now find the perfect donor matches that could save their lives, while more than 70 percent of whites do. Without a registry and cord-blood bank, no Nigerians do.

“This is a slam-dunk, from my point of view,” Mr. Adebiyi said. “The U.S. registries are trying to figure out how to increase the population of minority donors; this is a solution they should be interested in.”

Becoming a donor is relatively simple nowadays; only a cheek swab is needed to test for a match. Donating rarely requires the painful hip punctures that used to be routine. Instead, an intravenous blood line runs through a cell separator after the donor takes drugs to push the stem cells into the bloodstream. The process is no more burdensome than dialysis, experts say.

But for African-Americans like Mr. Adebiyi, finding matches is particularly difficult. Blacks are less likely to register as donors; while blacks are 12.6 percent of the population, only 8 percent of registered donors are black.

“It’s lack of education about it, and mistrust of the medical system after scandals like Tuskegee,” said Shauna Melius, co-founder of Preserve Our Legacy, citing the Tuskegee, Ala., experiment in which government doctors recruited black farmers for research and let those with syphilis go untreated for decades. Her organization recruits donors at Harlem Hospital and through drives featuring black celebrities.

“Plus,” she added, “people are skeptical because you’re collecting DNA.”

Complicating the problem, blacks are more genetically diverse than whites. Anatomically modern Homo sapiens existed in Africa for 200,000 years before migrating north to Europe a little over 40,000 years ago, so all Europeans descend from the shallower end of the gene pool.

Compensation for bone marrow donors, continued

The latest in the controversy over compensation for bone marrow donors is that the government's petition for a rehearing has been denied: Kim Krawiec has the story, with links... Flynn V. Holder Rehearing Denied

New Orleans school choice goes live

Recovery School District says new pupil enrollment system is getting the job done

The state-run district that governs most of the public schools in New Orleans has finished assigning more than 25,000 pupils who turned in applications for seats at one of 67 campuses this spring, declaring its new central enrollment system a success. Recovery School District officials said Wednesday that of the 3,841 students looking for a kindergarten or ninth-grade seat -- broadly speaking, those entering the system for the first time or making the transition to high school -- 84 percent got into one of the first three choices they ranked on their application. About 76 percent got their top choice.

View full sizeJohn McCusker, The Times-PicayuneAmong elementary schools, Dr. Martin Luther King Charter School, Lafayette Academy and Martin Behrman were the most popular. Janet Wolfe was photographed teaching her second-grade class at Lafayette Academy in October.

Of the 19,896 looking for a place in the other grades, about 73 percent got one of their top three choices. And 59 percent got their first choice.
On the other hand, almost 16 percent of students heading into kindergarten or the ninth grade didn't get any of the choices they ranked, along with 26 percent of students in other grades. Because there are a limited number of seats in any given school and some schools are more popular than others, it was inevitable that some students would have to stay put where they already attend or be manually assigned by the district.
State officials said that in those cases, they assigned students to open seats using random lottery numbers, giving preference to those living closer to one school than another. A little more than half of the students who didn't get any school that they ranked will remain in the school they already attend.
The data also suggested that only a fairly narrow set of public schools in New Orleans have built a strong enough reputation to draw big applicant pools. The state said that on average, families ranked only 2.6 elementary schools and 2.4 high schools, even though they could have ranked as many as eight.
"It says two things," concluded Gabriela Fighetti, the Recovery District's director of student enrollment. "There are some schools that families really want to go to -- and we really need to keep improving our full range of schools so that families have more options."

View full size

Overall though, state officials are pointing to these numbers as a sign that the district's new central enrollment process, which made its debut this year, is working.
The state moved to centralize enrollment this spring after years of complaints from parents about the difficulty of finding a school in a city where so many independent charter schools have been handling the process on their own. In past years, families who wanted to try for a spot at more than one charter school -- charters now educate close to 80 percent of the city's public school students -- had to fill out separate applications and hope that one of their choices had an open seat.
Now the district is assigning seats based on how families rank their top choices, their proximity to the school and a random lottery number.
Families are being notified this week where their children will attend in the fall. Anyone can appeal their assignment, and given the significant number of pupils assigned a school they didn't ask for, that could prove a contentious, emotional process.
"If you're asking if there were wrinkles, absolutely," said Vera Triplett, CEO of the New Beginnings charter school network. "There were kids who weren't assigned to any of their choices, kids who didn't get into a school where their sibling goes, that kind of thing."
Triplett added: "I think a lot of it will be ironed out after it's brought to the district's attention."
Still, the district isn't in a position to give every family what it wants. Seats are limited, and if parents ranked only the more popular schools, they were more likely to be disappointed.
The Recovery District released a list of the top three most popular schools for different grade levels on Wednesday, but officials had not compiled complete rankings for every school in the city. Those in the top three tended to be schools with better performance scores from the state, as measured by test results and other factors.
Among elementary schools, Dr. Martin Luther King Charter School, Lafayette Academy and Martin Behrman topped the list. For just those students entering kindergarten, however, schools that are a part of the KIPP charter network proved the most popular, with KIPP Central City, KIPP McDonogh 15 and KIPP Believe in the top three slots.
Lake Area, Sophie B. Wright and Sci Academy were the top secondary schools among all applicants, while those entering the ninth grade most often chose Lake Area, Sci Academy and KIPP Renaissance.

*********************
See these previous posts on IIPSC projects.

There's a market for economists

The WSJ takes note: Battle for Academic Economists Is Heating Up

A belt plus suspenders for North Carolina on same sex marriage, while Obama comes out (in favor)

When is a repugnant transaction doubly repugnant? When a State that has a law against it passes a constitutional amendment against it, just to be clear.
North Carolina Voters Pass Same-Sex Marriage Ban

"As expected, North Carolinians voted in large numbers on Tuesday for an amendment that would ban same-sex marriages, partnerships and civil unions, becoming the 30th state in the country and the last in the South to include a prohibition on gay marriage in the state constitution.
...
"North Carolina, a religious but also relatively moderate state on social issues, already has a law banning same-sex marriage. But Republican lawmakers pushed an amendment out of concern that the law was in danger of being struck down by judges."
***********


And, as if to make it clear that same sex marriage is in transition as a repugnant transaction, the next day (i.e. yesterday): Obama Says Same-Sex Marriage Should Be Legal (while Mitt Romney reiterated his opposition).

"President Obama on Wednesday ended nearly two years of “evolving” on the issue of same-sex marriage by publicly endorsing it in a television interview, taking a definitive stand on one of the most contentious and politically charged social issues of the day.

“At a certain point, I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married,” Mr. Obama told ABC News in an interview that came after the president faced mounting pressure to clarify his position.
...

"Hours before the president’s announcement, Mr. Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, restated his opposition to same-sex marriage in an interview with KDVR-TV, a Fox News affiliate in Colorado.

“When these issues were raised in my state of Massachusetts, I indicated my view, which is I do not favor marriage between people of the same gender, and I do not favor civil unions if they are identical to marriage other than by name,” Mr. Romney said. “My view is the domestic partnership benefits, hospital visitation rights and the like are appropriate, but that the others are not.”

"Public support for same-sex marriage is growing at a pace that surprises even professional pollsters as older generations of voters who tend to be strongly opposed are supplanted by younger ones who are just as strongly in favor. Same-sex couples are featured in some of the most popular shows on television, without controversy."

How not to communicate about kidney exchange

Kidney exchange, aka kidney paired donation is a great opportunity, but it has to be communicated to patients and donors. The state of the art is practiced by surgeons like Dr. Adam Bingaman in San Antonio, who makes sure that patients and donors hear about all options before they even begin to be tested for compatibility. That way, if they are incompatible, they're not surprised to hear they still have options.

Other hospitals only mention kidney exchange after testing donors and finding them incompatible with their intended recipient. Here's a few sentences of a story that makes that clear:

"After testing, Hendon received a letter from UCLA saying she was not a good match.

“I was so sad, almost devastated,” she said. “Then at the bottom of the letter, in tiny letters, it mentioned I could still be involved in a kidney exchange. I called them the next day and they seemed surprised that I still wanted to do it and started the process.”

"Once she was approved, it was not long before she was notified that they had a recipient waiting for her kidney."
*********

The donor in question participated in this nonsimultaneous extended altruistic donor (NEAD) chain.

Unraveling of the second year summer associate market: derailed on the fast track

The meltdown of the law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf has consequences for the lawyers they hired years in advance. Here's a story about the students who accepted summer internships a year ago...

For Law Students, Dewey & LeBoeuf Internships Evaporate

"[last week]...about 30 students learned that their plum summer jobs at Dewey & LeBoeuf had vanished. 

[These students] "had expected to walk out of their final exams this week and into a summer position promised back in the fall. Like summer associate jobs at most white-shoe law firms, they would have earned around $3,000 a week, plus free meals, field trips and other goodies. It would be a cushy, two-month courtship that virtually guaranteed equally lucrative employment with Dewey after graduation.

"But now those jobs are gone, and just about every comparable opportunity was booked nearly a year ago.

"The legal industry has an unusually synchronized and suffocatingly compressed hiring schedule. Most big law firms do not have rolling applications for their summer slots. Instead, they interview students during the same two-week period right as their second year of law school begins. At that point students have received only two semesters of grades, but those grades will determine where they work the next summer — and often, for the rest of their lives. That is because firms offer permanent, postgraduation jobs to just about every summer associate, for fear of looking like their business has suddenly dropped off if they do not.

"With Dewey’s announcement, these students’ careful, fastidiously risk-averse career planning collapsed under them, and they fell off the job track not just for Dewey but for its peer firms. Of the dozens of major firms contacted for this article, only one had picked up one of these stranded summer associates, and that was because one of its partners had a personal connection to the student.

American economic association finances; legacy of Mark Perlman

An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the finances of academic professional societies brings back fond memories of my late Pittsburgh colleague Mark Perlman: Scholarly Groups' Choices Yield Diverging Fortunes.

""When new executive-committee members come on, I say, 'Let me explain the finances of the association,'" says John J. Siegfried, secretary-treasurer of the American Economic Association. "We have two products that subsidize everything else."
Most of that subsidy comes from the association's online database, EconLit; the other source is the association's jobs listings, which employers pay to post and which appear chiefly online. "It radically changes our business model," Mr. Siegfried says of EconLit, "though that's flattering it."
His breezy description of the association's economic model acknowledges how the quirks of history and personality can produce long-term consequences. Indeed, the economists' group owes much of its present fiscal strength to choices made decades ago. When asked how his scholarly association went about developing EconLit, Mr. Siegfried answered simply, "You have Mark Perlman."
Mr. Perlman, who died in 2006, was hailed for his encyclopedic knowledge of the discipline's philosophy, history, and institutions. He was an economist at the University of Pittsburgh in 1969, when the Journal of Economic Literature, which he founded, started publishing articles, book reviews, and a bibliography of scholarship in economics.
For several years, Mr. Perlman and association staff collected journals and manuscripts, piling them in eight-foot-high stacks in the narrow corridors of a dark, cramped space next to a beauty parlor on Forbes Avenue, near Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University.
"An earthquake in Pittsburgh would likely have led to our employees being crushed under economics journals," Mr. Siegfried wrote earlier this year in toasting the retirement of Dru Ekwurzel, who served as the association's director of publications.
In the early 1980s, Ms. Ekwurzel was instrumental in transferring tapes of journal citations, abstracts, and bibliographic material to an online information-retrieval service. Scholars would gain access to this database through a terminal and dial-up service at a subscribing library. In 1984 that database, named EconLit, made its debut at the association's annual meeting.
By the time the World Wide Web was born, the association was well positioned. In 2010, EconLit generated nearly $3.9-million in revenue from subscribing libraries and universities, or more than 40 percent of the association's budget.
The group's seven journals, available in print and online, are agenda setters for the field, but they also cost far more to produce than the income they generate. The group's annual meeting breaks even.
With a surplus of more than $1.2-million and income from EconLit and the job listings, the association chose recently to slash by more than half, to as little as $20, its fees for membership, in hopes of stemming a 13-percent decline in members since 2003.
"We have a strange situation of not hanging on by our fingernails," Mr. Siegfried says, "and I know others are."
**********
Mark passed away in May 2006.
Obituary: Mark Perlman / Prominent economist of post-World War II era

Professor Mark Perlman: Historian of economic thought

Same-sex divorce: A predictable repugnant transaction?

A same sex couple who got married in California when same-sex marriages were briefly legal there, wants to get divorced in Maryland, where they live. Both of them have agreed on the details of property etc. But a judge has ruled they can't divorce, since they couldn't get married in Maryland...A court’s conundrum: When same-sex partners want to split

"They both want to get divorced. But a Prince George’s County judge said they could not, reasoning that because same-sex marriage is not legal in the state, neither is same-sex divorce.


"Now the highest court in Maryland will decide whether he was right, and whether the women will be required to maintain a bond they’ve tried for almost two years to sever."

Dress exchange

Joshua Gans points out to me that now there's a dress exchange called 99dresses.comhttp://www.99dresses.com/ (which seems less complicated than kidney exchange).

FREE FASHION

and never wear the same thing twice!

Get Started It's FREE. Learn more about how it works.

1 UPLOAD

Upload your quality unwanted clothes, shoes and accessories into the Infinite Closet.

2 SELL

Sell your fashion to other girls for a virtual currency called buttons.

3 SPEND

Spend your buttons on anything you want in the Infinite Closet.  

School choice in Denver: early reports

Denver has rolled out its new school choice system, and here are some news stories about the results:

DPS school choice program accommodates most students
"In the first year using a new system that centralized school choice applications within Denver Public Schools, a vast majority of students were able to get into their top picks.
"We're seeing enrollment increases all across the city and are thrilled to be serving more Denver families and seeing the high level of participation in SchoolChoice," DPS Superintendent Tom Boasberg said

DPS’ SchoolChoice worked – for most
"Nearly 70 percent of the 23,000 families who participated in Denver Public Schools’ new streamlined enrollment process got into their top choice schools, DPS leaders announced Monday.
"Meanwhile, 80 percent got into their first or second choice school and 83 percent got a spot in their first, second or third choice.
"It was unclear whether the participation in school choice increased this year over previous years, but several parents interviewed said the system seemed more fair and easier to navigate – with less gaming of the system by well-connected parents."

And here's a video news report.

(And here's the IIPSC project page that includes Denver.)

MIT celebrates Parag Pathak

Game theory, in the real world: MIT economist Parag Pathak engineers practical solutions to complicated education problems

...
In 2003, New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein, who wanted to revamp the school-choice system, approached a Harvard University professor named Alvin Roth about the problem. Roth had studied the method for matching medical students to their residencies; New York officials hoped something similar would work for their school system.

In turn, Roth asked Pathak, then a first-year PhD student in economics, to look into New York’s school-choice system: Was it a substantive and interesting problem? Pathak decided it was. A decade later, he is still producing new research on the topic, and in 2011 received tenure at MIT, in part because of his work in the area.

Moreover, that work has produced real-world results. Based on the research of Roth and his collaborators, New York City soon adopted what is known as a “deferred-acceptance algorithm” to assign places. Then, Roth’s group, now including economist Tayfun Sonmez, helped Boston review its choice system, leading the city to adopt a new method in 2005.

Using this method, schools first weigh all the students listing those schools as first-choice venues; then, the students who are rejected are essentially allowed to revise their lists, and the process repeats until every student has been matched with a school selection. The crucial difference is that students and families can simply pick the schools they most want to attend, in order.

“Our whole agenda is to try to make these systems strategy-proof,” says Pathak, now an associate professor of economics at MIT. “All these methods move in the direction of simplifying the system for students.” Complicated tactical guesses about popularity are moot; the entire process is based on the substantive merits of schools.

This positive outcome, Pathak says, is the fruit of “trying to think of economics as an engineering discipline,” in order to construct practical solutions to real-world problems.

Within economics, his growing area of specialization is known as “market design.” Beyond schools, market-design problems can be found in health care, financial markets, even the process of keyword searching on the Internet. “These allocation problems are everywhere,” says Pathak, who now also studies school-performance questions and has produced papers examining the quirks of housing markets.

What makes schools good?


"Pathak is the son of Nepalese parents who immigrated to the United States in the 1970s. He grew up in Corning, N.Y., where his father is a doctor and his mother a writer, before attending Harvard as an undergraduate. A direct line can be drawn between Pathak’s career and a class he took during his senior year at Harvard in the spring of 2002, team-taught by Roth and Paul Milgrom, two leaders in market design; Milgrom advised the Federal Communications Commission on the design of their broadcasting-spectrum auctions.

Pathak, an applied mathematics major who graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, says that class allowed him to recognize the possibility of linking game theory with practical problems. He soon enrolled in graduate school in economics at Harvard, received his PhD in 2007 and joined MIT in 2008.

Since then, Pathak’s research on school-choice issues has expanded in part because other places, including Chicago and much of England, have adopted systems similar to the ones he endorses — but due to their own initiative. “It’s as if they followed the discussion in Boston, although there is no evidence of it,” Pathak says. “It’s a great story of how markets evolve.” 

Although strategy-proof systems are gaining in popularity, many cities do not employ them. And yet Pathak believes that in addition to making the selection process simpler, the new systems can lead to a virtuous circle in assessing school quality: If administrators know what students’ real preferences are — as opposed to their tactics-based selections — they can examine what makes certain schools popular and try to institute those elements of good schools in other places, too.

“If we have programs that are oversubscribed, we should figure out why and consider replicating them,” Pathak says.

To be sure, it can be very difficult for people to assess whether or not schools are good in the first place, and for what reasons. In part because of this, Pathak’s interests have developed to include measuring school performance. Along with MIT economists Joshua Angrist and David Autor, he is a founding director of the School Effectiveness &; Inequality Institute at MIT, a new center that launched this year.

Angrist, Pathak and a variety of co-authors have published multiple studies about the performance of charter schools in Massachusetts, for instance, using random samples of students from schools’ admissions lotteries. While recognizing that this can be a “politically charged” issue, Pathak says their aim is simply to shine some empirical light on the matter. So far, the results they have found are nuanced: Some charter schools in urban areas such as Boston have dramatically improved student performance, but charter schools in other parts of Massachusetts have generally performed worse than their non-charter public counterparts.

The researchers are still trying to determine exactly why this is, and aim to expand their studies geographically. But the technical expertise of Pathak and Angrist — a pioneer in developing and refining “natural experiments” in economics — makes them confident they can rigorously equitably assess thorny questions about student performance.

“Through school assignment, we have an engine to measure a lot of things about education production,” Pathak says. And now, students have a vehicle for choosing schools on their merits.
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Let me add that, along with Atila Abdulkadiroglu and Neil Dorosin and yours truly, Parag continues to assist school districts in the design and implementation of school choice systems via the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice (IIPSC).

Facebook promotes deceased organ donation

Facebook Is Urging Members to Add Organ Donor Status

"The company announced a plan on Tuesday morning to encourage everyone on Facebook to start advertising their donor status on their pages, along with their birth dates and schools — a move that it hopes will create peer pressure to nudge more people to add their names to the rolls of registered organ donors.


"It is a rare foray by Facebook into social engineering from social networking, and one with a potentially profound effect, according to experts in the field of organ donation.

"They say people declaring on Facebook that they are organ donors could spur others to sign up at motor vehicle departments or online registries. But these experts say Facebook could create an informal alternative to such registries that could, even though it carries less legal weight, lead to more organ donations.
"That is because a disclosure on Facebook could provide the evidence of consent that family members need when deciding whether to donate the organs of a loved one, said Dr. Andrew M. Cameron, the surgical director of liver transplantation at Johns Hopkins Hospital."
*********

And here's the Facebook page that explains how to do it (complete with instructional video): Sharing Your Organ Donor Status

HT: Judd Kessler, Peter Coles

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At The Atlantic, Megan Garber talked to several economists:
Organ Donation Is a Market Problem -- And Facebook May Have Just Solved It

Here's what she had to say about her conversation with me:

"I think it's great news that Facebook is going to encourage people to register as organ donors, and (maybe as important) to communicate to family and friends their intention," says Alvin Roth, an economics professor at Harvard who specializes in, among other things, market design and game theory -- both fields he has applied to his work with ... kidney exchange "We need to be facilitating all sorts of donation," he notes, "if we're going to turn the tide on the shortage of transplantable organs."

"When I started working on kidney exchange," Roth told me in an email, "there were 40,000+ patients on the waiting list for deceased donor kidneys. Today there are 90,000+." And while kidney exchange "is winning some important battles," he notes -- among other things, it's currently the fastest-growing part of kidney transplantation -- "we're losing the war." There simply aren't enough suppliers to fill the demand. But the advent of online registries, like that of Facebook partner Donate Life, can change those dynamics -- and Facebook's social platform can, in turn, amplify them.   "

The NSF celebrates kidney exchange

Over at Science Nation, the NSF  published a short news article yesterday, together with a video, to  note the success of NSF funded research in helping establish kidney exchange (also called kidney paired donation, KPD).

Here's the article:
New Software Matches More Kidney Donations, Faster: Game theory and market dynamics inspire new software that streamlines complicated matches

"With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Harvard University economist Alvin Roth helped develop a suite of computer programs that match living kidney donors with recipients. His team includes market designer Itai Ashlagi and operations researcher David Gamarnik at MIT and economists Utku Unver and Tayfun Sonmez at Boston College."
...
"Transplant surgeon Michael Rees at the University of Toledo Medical center is CEO of the Alliance for Paired Donation (see www.paireddonation.org) [says]
..."game theory and market design have come together to find practical solutions for kidney disease patients."

 And here's the 2-minute video:
(Key question in the video, read in an incredulous tone: "What's an economist doing organizing kidney transplants?" Answer: "Turns out, an understanding of game theory and market dynamics is key...")

Who gets what in medical resident matching

Here's a paper that reports on the many residency positions filled outside of the match, in large part by graduates of foreign medical schools. "In 2007, 1 in 5 positions in primary care was offered outside the match."

    Out-of-Match Residency Offers: The Possible Extent and Implications of Prematching in Graduate Medical Education.
    Wetz RV, Seelig CB, Khoueiry G, Weiserbs KF, J Grad Med Educ; 2010 Sep;2(3):327-33 
 *********

    Another paper reports that students from higher prestige American schools match disproportionately into "controllable lifestyle" specialties ("anesthesiology, dermatology, emergency medicine, neurology, ophthalmology, otolaryngology, pathology, psychiatry, and radiology") ...

    Match rates into higher-income, controllable lifestylespecialties for students from highly ranked, research-based medical schoolscompared with other applicants.
    Patel MS, Katz JT, Volpp KG,  J Grad Med Educ; 2010 Sep;2(3):360-5 

 ***************

    And here's my paper on the history of the match...

    Roth, Alvin E., "The origins, history, and design of the resident match, JAMA. Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 289, No. 7, February 19, 2003, 909-912.

Home exchanges

In the WSJ, a retired California couple discuss the (approaching three dozen) home exchanges they have done, bartering a stay at their San Diego condo for visits of a few weeks to a month all over the world, via two networks, homeexchange.com and homelink.org.

"Exchanging homes involves some negotiating. Your leverage depends on the desirability of the home you have to exchange. In the U.S., New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., are favorites of international exchangers. After that, there is a second tier of cities, which includes San Diego.

"(One tricky area in negotiations: whether to exchange cars. Our preference is to rely on local transportation. Some cities, like Paris and London, have great public transportation. Unfortunately, San Diego doesn't, and our exchange partners feel strongly that we need to exchange cars. We've done so about half the time.)
...
"On each Internet site, we have a page with photos of our home, information about San Diego and ourselves, and details about when, where and with whom we want to exchange. Once we make contact with a potential partner, we discuss details of dates, number of people, transportation, etc. On average, an exchange takes about 20 emails and an occasional phone call to work out all the arrangements.
...
"We are often asked if we have any problems with our exchanges. We do. The biggest problem is cancellations. Since our first choice is to exchange with other older adults, unexpected medical problems can be an issue. With younger exchangers, you can encounter job or financial problems. In a few cases, my guess is that people cancel because they get a better offer—but they never admit that.

"We have had seven cancellations in connection with our 32 exchanges. Fortunately, all except one were early enough that we hadn't made plane reservations and could arrange alternative exchanges."

The OPTN Kidney Paired Donation Program --progress report, April 2012

Since opening for business in late 2010, the UNOS/OPTN kidney exchange pilot program has succeeded in enrolling many transplant centers. But so far it has not completed many transplants compared to other kidney exchange networks. (What to do about this was one subject of the recent conference I blogged about here: Competition among kidney exchanges.)

Here's the latest report from UNOS: Everything You Wanted to Know about the OPTN Kidney Paired Donation Program
"The OPTN kidney paired donation pilot program (KPDPP) continues to expand; as of mid-April, 114 transplant centers are participating – view list. The goal is to increase the number of living donor kidney transplants, so center participation is crucial to the success of the national KPD program. Results from recent match runs indicate an upward trend in the number of donors and candidates matched. In the match run conducted in March, 24 matches of compatible potential donors and recipients were found from a pool of 163 donors and 145 candidates, about twice as many matches as the previous month. So far, 19 kidney candidates have received a transplant in the program as of mid-April. "
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The page at the link contains a link to some background reports, including the one below which (together with the comments) gives some insights into the kind of debates about kidney exchange policies that have been going on at the program:

• Board briefing paper: proposal to include non-directed donors and donor chains in the KPD pilot program  

And here is some of the evidence that long chains are good for kidney patients, particularly for highly sensitized patients:

• Ashlagi, Itai, Duncan S. Gilchrist, Alvin E. Roth, and Michael A. Rees, ; ''Nonsimultaneous Chains and Dominos in Kidney Paired Donation -- Revisited,'' American Journal of Transplantation, 11, 5, May 2011, 984-994.
• Ashlagi, Itai, Duncan S. Gilchrist, Alvin E. Roth, and Michael A. Rees, "NEAD Chains in Transplantation," American Journal of Transplantation, December 2011, 11:2780-2781.

Jacob Leshno defends his Ph.D. dissertation

Defense 4

Dr. Jacob Leshno (in suit:), and Al Roth, Susan Athey, and Ariel Pakes (Drew Fudenberg on skype)

And here is what the picture would have looked like if Drew had used photoshop instead of skype:

Drew looks on approvingly (in a photo doctored by the new doctor...)

The title of Jacob's dissertation is Essays in Market Design.  (How cool is that?)

The three papers he chose to include in his dissertation are

Dynamic Matching in Overloaded Systems (Job Market Paper)

In many assignment problems items arrive stochastically over time. When items are scarce agents form an overloaded waiting list and items are dynamically allocated as they arrive; two examples are public housing and organs for transplant. Even when all the scarce items are allocated, there is the efficiency question of how to assign the right items to the right agents. I develop a model in which impatient agents with heterogeneous preferences wait to be assigned scarce heterogeneous items that arrive stochastically over time. Social welfare is maximized by appropriately matching agents to items, but an individual impatient agent may misreport her preferences to receive an earlier mismatched item. To incentivize an agent to avoid mismatch, the policy needs to provide the agent with a (stochastic) guarantee of future assignment, which I model as putting the agents in a priority buffer-queue. I first consider a standard queue-based allocation policy and derive its welfare properties. To determine the optimal policy, I formulate the dynamic assignment problem as a dynamic mechanism design problem without transfers. The resulting optimal incentive compatible policy uses a buffer-queue of a new queueing policy, the uniform wait queue, to minimize the probability of mismatching agents. Finally, I derive a robustly optimal policy which uses a simple rule: giving equal priority to every agent who declines a mismatched item (a SIRO buffer-queue). This robustly optimal policy has several good properties that make it a compelling market design policy recommendation.

A Supply and Demand Framework for Two-Sided Matching Markets, with Eduardo Azevedo
(Extended abstract published in EC11 under the former name: "The college admissions problem with a continuum of students" )

We give a version of the Gale and Shapley (1962) college admissions problem where colleges have a large capacity and show that the resulting model allows for tractable analysis of matching markets. When colleges are large stable matchings can be described concisely by cutoffs, the admission thresholds at each college. Under broad conditions the model corresponds to the limit of large discrete matching problems.

Will a Decrease In The Minimum Wage Improve Training?, with Michael Schwarz

We show that firms that have a cost advantage in providing training can recoup training cost even in an almost frictionless labor market. Lowering the minimal legal wage can reduce the efficiency of training and harm welfare. In our model training contracts give positive surplus to workers that is not competed away. This explains the existence of intermediary services that essentially sell internship positions to college graduates.

Jacob is one of the group of job market candidates I blogged about here: Five Harvard candidates for the Economics job market this year (2011-12)

He will be going next year to a postdoc at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, after which he'll take up a position at Columbia GSB.

This concludes my defenses for the week (and the Offense never even got a point up on the board...)

Welcome to the club, Jacob.