New U.S. rules proposed for organ donor reimbursements and Organ Procurement Organizations

Here's the press release from HHS.gov:
Trump Administration Proposes New Rules to Increase Accountability and Availability of the Organ Supply  December 17, 2019

"The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) today took major steps to increase the availability of organs for the 113,000 Americans on waitlists for lifesaving organ transplants – 20 of whom die each day. As directed by President Trump in his July 10 Executive Order on Advancing American Kidney Health, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is issuing a proposed rule to change the way organ procurement organizations (OPOs) are held accountable for their performance, and the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) is issuing a proposed rule to remove financial barriers to living organ donation.
...
"Removing Financial Disincentives to Living Organ Donation

The President’s Executive Order on Advancing American Kidney Health emphasized that supporting living organ donors can help address the current demand for kidney transplants. HRSA’s proposed rule would expand the scope of reimbursable expenses for living donors to include lost wages, and childcare and eldercare expenses for those donors who lack other forms of financial support. This proposal could increase the number of transplant recipients receiving a better quality organ in a shorter time period from living donors. In general, recipients of kidney transplants from living organ donors have better clinical outcomes than those who continue on dialysis or those who receive a deceased donor kidney transplant. HRSA also is reviewing a notice that would increase the income threshold for living donors eligible for reimbursements.

"Organ Procurement Organization (OPO) Conditions for Coverage Proposed Rule

OPO act as a link between organ donors and organ recipients, procuring organs from hospitals and delivering them to transplant centers. Federal law tasks CMS with conducting inspections (“surveys”) of OPOs and certifying them for participation in Medicare based on whether they meet Medicare’s Conditions for Coverage – which are basic quality and safety regulations – including outcomes and process requirements.

OPOs’ performance is currently assessed through self-reported data based on measures that were last overhauled in 2006. Today, CMS is proposing much needed changes to hold OPOs accountable and incentivize them to actively collect donated organs and improve transplantation rates in their donation service area (DSA).

CMS estimates that if all OPOs were to meet both the donation and transplantation rate measures, the number of annual transplants would increase from about 32,000 to 37,000 by 2026, for a total of almost 15,000 additional transplants in that time.

The proposed rule would improve the current measures by using objective and reliable data, incentivize OPOs to ensure all viable organs are transplanted, and hold OPOs to greater oversight while driving higher OPO performance. To better serve organ transplant recipients and the many people waiting for a transplant, CMS is proposing:

• Donation rate measure: The donation rate would be the number of actual deceased donors as a percentage of the donor potential, which would be defined as total inpatient deaths in the DSA among patients 75 years of age or younger with any cause of death that would not preclude a potential donor from donating an organ.
• Transplantation rate measure: The organ transplantation rate would be the number of organs transplanted as a percentage of the donor potential, which would be defined as total inpatient deaths in the DSA among patients 75 years of age or younger with any cause of death that would not preclude a potential donor from donating an organ.
• Top 25 percent benchmark: CMS is proposing that all OPOs meet the donation and transplantation rates of the current top 25 percent of OPOs, which would be made public.
• 12-month reviews: At the end of each re-certification cycle (every four years), an OPO would have to meet the CMS requirements for both the donation rate and transplantation rate measures. CMS is proposing to review OPO performance every 12 months throughout the four year re-certification cycle to more quickly identify OPOs that need improvement and ensure fewer viable organs are wasted and more timely transplants occur.

Most of the proposed changes would not take effect until 2022. "

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Here are the particular announcements:

Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to amend the regulations implementing the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 (NOTA)

Fact Sheet | December 2019

and

Organ Procurement Organization (OPO) Conditions for Coverage Proposed Rule: Revisions to Outcome Measures for OPOs  Dec 17, 2019 

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Earlier post:

Tuesday, July 16, 2019

President Trump's Executive Order on kidney care

Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to amend the regulations implementing the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 (NOTA)Fact Sheet | December 2019

Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to amend the regulations implementing the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 (NOTA)Fact Sheet | December 2019

Market design workshop in Santiago, SUSPENDED

Politics can certainly get in the way of economics, even academic economics, as it turns out.  The organizers of a conference on matching and market design that I had planned to attend prudently decided  several weeks ago to postpone it, in light of the street demonstrations taking place in Chile.

Market Design Workshop, 17 - 20 December, Santiago, Chile: SUSPENDED
Organizers: Itai Ashlagi, José Correa, Juan Escobar

"This workshop is a venue to discuss recent developments and methods in the area of market design, both from a theoretical and applied perspective. Central to the workshop is the multidisciplinary nature of the area so that an important goal is to bring together top researchers from three related scientific communities: Economists, Computer Scientists and researchers from Operations Management."
***********

Some background news:
How a $0.04 metro fare price hike sparked massive unrest in Chile
Thousands of people in Chile have taken to the streets to protest against the government.

and here's a more recent update:
Chile protests: UN accuses security forces of human rights abuses

United frequent flier updates as market design, by Scott Kominers

Scott Kominers, at Bloomberg (possibly written while flying):

United’s Frequent-Flier Program Gets Some Game Theory
The change is a case study in marketplace design.
By Scott Duke Kominers

"In United’s old program, those who reached top frequent-flier status were given a number of upgrade certificates that could be used to boost tickets from one class of service to another, typically from economy to business. 2  Some of these upgrades were regional, meaning that they could only be used on a select set of flights -- mostly all within North America -- whereas others could be used globally. To obtain an upgrade, customers often had to join waiting lists, where priority was determined by a mixture of flier status, ticket type and request date. As a result, plenty of fliers didn’t get the upgrades they wanted.

"The new program replaces the fixed-format upgrades with a currency-like system called PlusPoints, which, like the old certificates, are awarded to those with top status. Different types of flight upgrades now have different PlusPoints costs, at an exchange rate corresponding to the old upgrade format. Many upgrade requests will still be placed on waiting lists, but there's a new option to skip the waiting list if you're willing to pay a large PlusPoints premium.
...
"the change is also likely to reduce congestion in the upgrade market; under the old system, transnational long-haul flights such as those from Boston to San Francisco were frequently glutted with upgrade requests, because they were among the longest flights that qualified for regional upgrades.
...
"There’s also some funny game theory around the option to skip the waiting list. Whereas before everyone ended up on the same upgrade waiting lists, now some people will skip the line. But that means fewer upgraded seats will be available for those on the waiting list, which in turn creates more incentive to jump ahead. So we might see some customers buying the option of skipping the waiting list just to preempt others."

Market design, in Farsi

Here's an article in Farsi, from an Iranian blog:

طراحی بازار؛ حیات جدید اقتصاددانان دنیا

امروزه اقتصاددانان تنها برای تحلیل بازار فراخوانده نمی شوند بلکه از آن ها برای طراحی بازارها نیز کمک می‌گیرند. این نخستین شماره از پرونده راهبرد معاصر در معرفی زوایایی کمتر شناخته شده از دانش اقتصاد است.

Google translate: "Market Design; The New Life of World Economists.  Today, economists are not only called upon to analyze the market, but also to help design markets."

Matching in Marathi (the language of Maharashtra)

Ashutosh Thakur points out to me this article in the main Maharashtraian newspaper, ''Loksatta.''

संज्ञा आणि संकल्पना : ..जिथून पडल्या गाठी
अर्थशास्त्रात असलेली, पण आर्थिक व्यवहार नसलेली आपली आजची संकल्पना म्हणजे-मॅचिंग मार्केट्स.

Google translate doesn't make much headway with the top headline, but renders the subheading as
"Matching markets today are our concepts of economics, but not financial transactions."

Skin donation, by the square foot, for New Zealand volcano burn victims

CNN has the story, about a little-publicized part of the market for body parts:

New Zealand has ordered more than 1,290 square feet of skin for volcano victims

"New Zealand has ordered 1,292 square feet of skin to treat patients injured in Monday's volcanic eruption on White Island, authorities said Wednesday.

"A total of 47 people were on White Island, off the coast of North Island, when the eruption occurred. Eight people have been confirmed dead, and more than 20 others are currently hospitalized in critical condition.
...
"The skin is now needed to treat patients severely injured by the volcanic ash and gas. On Tuesday, medical officials said 27 people in hospital had burns to at least 30% of their bodies and many have inhalation burns that require airway support.
...
"We anticipate that we will require an additional 1.2 million square centimeters (1,292 square feet) of skin for the ongoing needs of the patients."

"To put that into context, the average human body has about 11 square feet (1 square meter) to 21 square feet (2 square meters) of skin surface area.

"The skin order has been placed and will come from the United States, Watson said. Skin and tissue banks from neighboring Australia, like the Donor Tissue Bank of Victoria, are also providing skin grafts and supplies.

"The skin grafts come from donors -- like organ donors, skin donors register to donate their skin after death. When skin is donated, usually only a thin layer is taken, like the skin that peels when you are sunburned, according to the Australian government's donation site. The skin grafts are usually taken from donors' backs or the back of their legs.

"The demand for skin is particularly high given the unprecedented number of severe burns to the victims, authorities said Wednesday"
**********

Here's a story with some other detail:
Aussies donate skin for volcano survivors

"The layers that we provide are essentially the epidermis which is the top layer of skin and a small lawyer of dermis underneath the skin," said Dr Stefan Poniatowski, head of the Donor Tissue Bank of Victoria.

"The immune system of the recipient will reject the epidermis layer, but the dermis will actually incorporate and provide a nice healthy wound bed for the patients' own skin to be grown or applied over the top.

"The allograft skin will be rejected, but it becomes a temporary biological dressing."
...
"The allograft skin is stored in liquid nitrogen and safely kept at ultra-low temperatures for up to five years."




HT: Philip Held

Might there be enough deceased donor organs if we used them efficiently?

It's hard to know how many deceased donor organs could be made available if we used them as efficiently as possible. Here's an essay in the WSJ by Stanford pulmonologist Dr. David Weill, who thinks that, with no wastage, the supply might be sufficient to meet the demand.

Supply Isn’t the Problem With Organ Transplants
There are plenty of donors to meet the need, but the system is so inefficient that available organs often don’t reach desperate patients
By David Weill
Dec. 6, 2019
"One of the first things that transplant doctors learn is that there are not enough organs to go around. We repeat it to our patients and ourselves and, in a way, it helps us to temper our expectations of saving every patient on our waiting list. But there isn’t really an organ shortage. We are just failing to make effective use of the organs that we could transplant."


HT: Alex Chan

Matching and market design in the latest issue of Theoretical Economics

Theoretical Economics, Volume 14, Number 4 (November 2019) has several articles on matching and market design

Common enrollment in school choice
Mehmet Ekmekci, M. Bumin Yenmez

Abstract: Increasingly, more school districts across the US are using centralized admissions for charter, magnet, and neighborhood schools in a common enrollment system. We first show that, across all school-participation patterns, full participation in the common (or unified) enrollment system leads to the most preferred outcome for students. Second, we show that, in general, participation by all schools may not be achievable because schools have incentives to stay out. This may explain why some districts have not managed to attain full participation. We also consider some specific settings where full participation can be achieved and propose two schemes that can be used by policymakers to achieve full participation in general settings.


School choice under partial fairness
Umut Dur, A. Arda Gitmez, Özgür Yılmaz

Abstract: We generalize the school choice problem by defining a notion of allowable priority violations. In this setting, a weak axiom of stability (partial stability) allows only certain priority violations. We introduce a class of algorithms called the Student Exchange under Partial Fairness (SEPF). Each member of this class gives a partially stable matching that is not Pareto dominated by another partially stable matching (i.e. constrained efficient in the class of partially stable matchings). Moreover, any constrained efficient matching that Pareto improves upon a partially stable matching can be obtained via an algorithm within the SEPF class. We characterize the unique algorithm in the SEPF class satisfying a desirable incentive property. The extension of the model to an environment with weak priorities enables us to provide a characterization result which proves the counterpart of the main result in Erdil and Ergin (2008).


Full substitutability
John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers, Alexandru Nichifor, Michael Ostrovsky, Alexander Westkamp

Abstract: Various forms of substitutability are essential for establishing the existence of equilibria and other useful properties in diverse settings such as matching, auctions, and exchange economies with indivisible goods. We extend earlier models' definitions of substitutability to settings in which each agent can be both a buyer in some transactions and a seller in others, and show that all these definitions are equivalent. We then introduce a new class of substitutable preferences that allows us to model intermediaries with production capacity. We also prove that substitutability is preserved under economically important transformations such as trade endowments, mergers, and limited liability.

Medically assisted suicide.

Several recent stories caught my eye on the controversial subject of medically assisted suicide, aka death with dignity, medical assistance in dying (MAID), and some other names.

He died by suicide in front of Alberta’s legislature. He said he wanted to bring attention to Medical Assistance in Dying   By Nadine Yousif, Star Edmonton, Sat., Dec. 7, 2019

"In his own final moments, Chan, 62, wanted people to know about the struggles of his loved ones, and how increased access to medical assistance in dying could help many end what may otherwise be a lifetime of suffering."
***********

The Champion Who Picked a Date to Die by ANDREW KEH, NY Times, Dec. 5, 2019

"Knowing she had the legal right to die helped Marieke Vervoort live her life. It propelled her to medals at the Paralympics. But she could never get away from the pain.
Andrew Keh and Lynsey Addario spent almost three years reporting on Marieke Vervoort as she and her parents wrestled with her decision to die by euthanasia. They visited her multiple times at home and in hospital stays in Belgium, and accompanied her on trips to the Canary Islands and Japan."
***********

Aid in Dying Soon Will be Available to More Americans. Few Will Choose It.
By October, more than one in five U.S. adults will be able to obtain lethal prescriptions if terminally ill. But for those who try, obstacles remain.
By Paula Span, July 8, 2019  NY Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday, September 23, 2019

Private equity races for young talent even earlier this year

Black markets for drugs in Europe: report of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction

Here is the 2019 report from the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) and Europol, the EU's police organization:

EU Drug Markets Report 2019
EMCDDA, Europol, Lisbon, November 2019

Summary: The EU Drug Markets Report 2019 is the third comprehensive overview of illicit drug markets in the European Union by the EMCDDA and Europol. The analysis presented in this report spans numerous topics such as the links between drugs and other crimes, the licit economy and society more generally as well as the processes and players involved in the trade, from production and trafficking to distribution. Taking an evidence-based approach, the report reviews the markets for heroin, cocaine, cannabis, amphetamine, methamphetamine, MDMA and new psychoactive substances. It also provides action points to inform policy development at EU and national level. This publication is an essential reference for law enforcement professionals, policymakers, the academic community and indeed for anyone seeking up-to-date information and analysis on drug markets in Europe.

Here is the full report.

From the Executive Summary:

"The drug market is a major source of income for organised crime groups (OCGs) in the EU, with minimum estimated retail value of EUR 30 billion per year. In addition to the economic impact, drug-related deaths and other harms to public health, there are broader consequences of drug markets, such as links with wider criminal activities and terrorism; the negative impact on the legal economy; violence in communities; damage to the environment; and the increasingly important issue of how the drug market can fuel corruption and undermine governance.
...
" All data indicate that overall drug availability within Europe, for both natural and synthetic drugs,
remains very high. The European drug market is increasingly characterised by consumers having access to a wide variety of high-purity and high-potency products that, in real terms, are usually equivalent in price or cheaper than they have been over the past decade.
...
"Cannabis
Europe’s biggest drug market is for cannabis and significant production of the drug takes place within the EU. With around 25 million annual users, the retail market for cannabis was estimated to be worth at least EUR 11.6 billion in 2017. Around one in seven young adults in the EU reports having used cannabis in the past year, with prevalence rates generally stable but with early signs of possible  increases in some countries.
...
"Herbal cannabis is extensively produced within the EU, with estimates indicating that at least 20 000 cultivation sites are dismantled each year, and is a major source of income for the criminal economy. Despite efforts to counter production, the Western Balkans, and Albania in particular, appear to remain an important source of origin for seized herbal cannabis
...
"Heroin and other opioids
The use of heroin and other opioids still accounts for the largest share of drug-related harms. The retail value of the heroin market in 2017 was estimated to be at least EUR 7.4 billion. There are indications that heroin availability in the EU may increase: recent opium production estimates from Afghanistan, levels of seizures in Turkey and intelligence assessments of activity along the main trafficking routes to Europe are all high, and large consignments of heroin have been detected within the EU.
...
"Cocaine
The cocaine market is the second largest illicit drug market in the EU, with an estimated minimum retail value in 2017 of EUR 9.1 billion. Surveys estimate that about 4 million people in the EU will have used cocaine in the past year. Use is still concentrated in the west and south of Europe but appears to be becoming more common elsewhere.
...
"While Colombian and Italian OCGs have historically played a central role in the trafficking
and distribution of cocaine, increasingly other groups are becoming more significant, including Albanian-speaking, British, Dutch, French, Irish, Moroccan, Serbian, Spanish and Turkish OCGs. At the same time some European OCGs have established a presence in Latin American countries, developing a new ‘end-to-end’ business model for managing the supply chain, with large quantities of cocaine purchased near production areas at lower costs. This may be driving competition and conflict within the cocaine market and leading to increasing cocaine market-related violence and corruption within the EU.
...
" The global market for cocaine appears to be growing and a knock-on effect of this is that the EU appears to be increasingly used as a transit area for cocaine destined for other markets such as Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Turkey and countries in the Middle East and Asia. The cocaine market is increasingly enabled by digital technology, including darknet markets and the use of the surface web, social media and mobile phone apps to advertise and facilitate the delivery of cocaine to consumers. Innovation seen in the supply chain at the consumer level is suggestive of both high
availability and attempts by OCGs to increase market share.
...
"Synthetic drugs: amphetamine, MDMA and methamphetamine
Europe’s synthetic drugs market, particularly in respect to stimulants like amphetamine, MDMA and methamphetamine, is evolving rapidly. Within the stimulant market, these drugs compete for market share alongside cocaine and a number of new psychoactive substances. Of the two closely related stimulants, amphetamine continues to be more commonly used than methamphetamine in most EU countries, though there are growing signs of a gradual diffusion of methamphetamine use. The value of the EU retail market for amphetamines (amphetamine and methamphetamine combined) in 2017 is estimated to be at least EUR 1 billion, and for MDMA EUR 0.5 billion.
...
"New psychoactive substances
Policies relating to new psychoactive substances (NPS) appear to be having some impact, especially those aimed at reducing open trade in the EU as well as measures taken in source countries, such as China. There has been a slow-down in the number of first detections of NPS in Europe. Currently around 50 new substances are reported annually, giving a total of over 730 that have been reported to the EU Early Warning System."

Sex, lies, videotape and...blackmail?

The NY Times has a very interesting story about how it, and two very prominent lawyers, became involved with a man who claimed to have access to videotapes of important men having sex with underrage women.  It touches on the subtle difference between blackmail and some kinds of legal settlement.

Jeffrey Epstein, Blackmail and a Lucrative ‘Hot List’
A shadowy hacker claimed to have the financier’s sex tapes. Two top lawyers wondered: What would the men in those videos pay to keep them secret?
*********

Matt Levine over at Bloomberg has an interesting followup article that begins this way:

"The basic “mystery of blackmail” is:

1. If I know that you have done some bad secret stuff, it is totally legal for me to publish that information.
2. It is also totally legal for me to keep it quiet.
3. In general, if it is legal for me to do or not do something, and you’d prefer that I (not) do it, I can ask you for money in exchange for (not) doing it.
4. But if I ask you for money in exchange for not publishing bad stuff about you, that’s blackmail, and it’s a crime.

The mystery is why blackmail should be illegal when its component parts aren’t. But there’s another practical mystery about blackmail, which is:

1. If you have done some bad stuff to me, and no one knows about it, I am once again free to tell everyone, or not.
2. If I go to you and say “give me a million dollars or I will tell people,” that is blackmail and I go to prison.
3. But if I go to you and say “I am going to sue you for doing the bad stuff to me, I am filing my case on Monday, but I am willing to settle for $1 million and sign a nondisclosure agreement in connection with the settlement,” that is fine, that is just how lawsuits work."

****************
Earlier related posts (on blackmail as a repugnant transaction that is sometimes occasioned by the knowledge that the victim has engaged in a different repugant transaction, and that can sometimes be whitewashed by the protected transaction of legal action...):

Monday, November 2, 2009

Blackmail, legal and illegal

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

Blackmail has something in common with transactions that become repugnant when money is added

Testing your own DNA is illegal in France

Statnews.com has the story:

In France, it’s illegal for consumers to order a DNA spit kit. Activists are fighting over lifting the ban  By ERIC BOODMAN

"The French ban on direct-to-consumer genetic testing is part of the country’s bioethics laws, which legislators are supposed to revise every seven years. When those discussions got underway earlier this year, some geneticists expected the National Assembly to relax the rules about commercial DNA analysis. It didn’t. Now, Jovanovic-Floricourt and the other genetics enthusiasts in her education and advocacy group, DNA Pass, are agitating more and more to get some of these tests legalized, contacting lawmakers, chatting up scientists, promising a more vociferous campaign than they’ve waged before.

"But as one of the most vocal pro-legalization advocates, Jovanovic-Floricourt may have found her match in geneticist Guillaume Vogt and his bioethicist postdoc Henri-Corto Stoeklé. Theirs is an unusual standoff, in that they’re all motivated by the same ideas. Both sides hope to protect French genomes from exploitation by foreign companies. Both sides believe that French institutions are the best guardians for the job. They just disagree about how, exactly, to realize that vision. As Vogt, a scientist at the National Center for Human Genomics Research, put it, “Don’t change the law!”

The still struggling legal market for cannabis

Here's an indirect update on the state of the American cannabis market, from the WSJ (hemp is a source for cannabidiol, or CBD):

Farmers Rushed Into Hemp. Now They Face a Glut.
Prices for the crops are falling, and some growers are struggling to unload their product

"A rush of farmers seeking to grow hemp, which became legal to cultivate in the U.S. last year, is creating a glut, damping prices and leaving some farmers struggling to unload their product. It is among the growing pains in the nascent industry for hemp-derived products—a potentially lucrative market, but one beset by regulatory uncertainty, financing constraints and other challenges.
...
"Hemp—which is the same plant species as marijuana, but with a minimal amount of the psychoactive compound in pot—was farmed legally in the U.S. until a 1937 federal law began a period of hemp prohibition. It became legal again because of a provision of the 2018 federal farm bill."

Congestion and competition in college admissions (in the WSJ)

Is college admissions ripe for re-design?  (The problems outlined are real, but I'm skeptical that there's the consensus needed for a major overhaul...)

How to Fix College Admissions
Getting into a top school is a stressful, unpredictable process. Here are 10 ways to make it fairer and more transparent.  By Melissa Korn

"We asked college admissions officers, high school and private counselors, parents, students and others for ways to make the system fairer, more transparent and less painful for everyone involved. Here are 10 of their ideas—some easy to implement, others just meant to start a conversation—to reform the status quo.
...
"2. Limit the number of colleges to which students may apply. Thanks in part to the ease of applying online—especially through the Common Application, which allows applicants to use one basic form for hundreds of colleges—36% of students submitted seven or more applications in 2017, up from 10% in 1995. “The number of clicks you can make on the Common App causes congestion in the system,” says Alvin Roth, a Nobel Prize-winning Stanford University economist who helped to design the system that matches new doctors with residency programs.

"Schools pursue aggressive outreach, urging even fairly unqualified applicants to apply, then boast every spring about how many they rejected, as if exclusivity is proof of quality. Ballooning application numbers, combined with stagnant class sizes, cause acceptance rates to slide even lower into the single digits at places like Columbia and Pomona. As a result, high-school seniors apply to more schools just in case, and the vicious cycle continues—creating havoc for schools that can’t predict their yields. The overall yield rate for new freshmen at U.S. colleges fell to 34% in 2017 from 48% in 2007.
...
"Almost nobody needs to submit 20 applications; a reasonable limit would be as low as a half dozen, assuming that students receive meaningful counseling. High schools could enforce the cap by only agreeing to submit a certain number of official transcripts to colleges. The College Board and ACT could also limit distribution of SAT and ACT results, but they have little incentive to do so, since they make money from sending scores.
...
"9. ...Even more radical, schools could try some version of the algorithm used to determine matches for medical residency programs, which involves programs and medical students ranking one another and then being paired up by a computer system. This would be a heavy lift, however, as colleges would need to coordinate their procedures to rank candidates, run the computer program and inform all parties about the outcomes."

Seema Jayachandran on the Banerjee, Duflo, Kremer Nobel, in the NYT

The Economic View column of the NY Times, by someone who knows the subject, and the subjects very well:

When a Disappointment Helped Lead to a Nobel Prize
The winners of this year’s Nobel in economics did pioneering field experiments that sometimes didn’t work as expected.  By Seema Jayachandran

"The negative finding about textbooks was important in the development of Mr. Kremer’s career. “I’m happier when I find that something works,” he said. “But I’m not in despair if I don’t — the key thing is listen and learn from it.”

Who is a refugee? Remembering U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata

The Lancet recalls the life and work of Sadako Ogata, born 16 September 1927; died 22 October 2019.

Sadako Ogata
"Sadako Ogata began to transform UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, almost as soon as she became UN High Commissioner for Refugees in 1991. At the time, the Gulf War had displaced more than a million Iraqi Kurds and thousands were blocked from crossing into Turkey. They were in desperate need just inside the Iraqi border. Ogata quickly sought to expand UNHCR's rules to allow it to provide aid not only to refugees but also to people displaced within their own country. “Most of the senior leaders in UNHCR were against providing assistance to those Kurdish refugees because they were inside Iraq”, said Izumi Nakamitsu, who was based in Turkey at the time for UNHCR and accompanied Ogata on her first mission as High Commissioner to visit the displaced Kurds. “The refugee law says that you're not a refugee until you cross the border and senior officials advised her against providing protection and assistance. But she instinctively felt this was wrong”, said Nakamitsu, who is now a UN Under-Secretary-General and High Representative for Disarmament Affairs. Ogata's insistence that UNHCR provide aid to people who are internally displaced is one of her lasting legacies."
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And from the Guardian:

Sadako Ogata obituary
Independent-minded head of the UN agency for refugees, who expanded its role to help millions more displaced people

Divorce as a repugnant transaction

A recent obituary reminds me that divorce used to be a repugnant transaction, to which there were barriers even when both partners in a marriage were eager to end it on agreed upon terms.  It was a repugnant transaction because of the way we regard marriage as a protected transaction.

Jerome Wilson, Key in Revamping New York Divorce Law, Dies at 88
As a legislator in 1966, he led a commission that pushed to broaden the legal grounds for divorce. New York had been the last state to recognize only adultery.

"Jerome L. Wilson, a former Democratic state senator from Manhattan who helped liberalize a rigorous 18th-century law that had left New York as the sole state that required a spouse to prove adultery as the only legal ground for divorce, died on Friday
...
"The amended act, which took effect on Sept. 1, 1967, added four other grounds for divorce: cruel treatment, abandonment for two years, the sentencing of a spouse to prison for five years or more and a couple’s living voluntarily apart for at least two years.
...
"In the second year after the law went into effect, the number of divorces granted in New York ballooned to 18,000 in all five categories, compared with 4,000 granted only for adultery during the last year that the old law was in effect.

"Supporters of the changes said the new law also reduced instances of perjury (because so many estranged spouses had to lie about allegations of adultery) and end runs by wealthier couples who could afford to fly to Mexico or Nevada and remain there for two weeks to qualify for a divorce.
...
"Mr. Wilson’s first marriage, in 1957 to Frances Roberts, ended in divorce."

Video: Big Data and Global Kidney Matching

Here's a talk, just recently posted on the web, that I gave in China at the Luohan Academy in Hangzhou, in June 2019.

Paying participants in economic experiments, in Ireland, in jeopardy

On Wednesday I received some email correspondence about a difficulty being faced by experimental economists in Ireland, who may be forbidden from paying participants in experiments, at least if the money comes from research grants

The issue has to do with this sentence on page 6 of the research grant guidelines of the Irish Research Council.
"Participants in surveys/focus groups/workshops or other such project related activities may not
be paid..." although their travel expenses can be reimbursed.

I dashed off the following statement in support of efforts to make sure that this policy isn't interpreted as preventing standard economics experiments.

“Laboratory experiments in Economics largely depend on specifying precisely and attempting to measure or  control  the incentives of the participants in an experiment. Almost always this involves paying the participants in ways that conform to the incentives the experimenter is trying to create.  [Paying subjects] is a well established and almost universal practice in experimental economics, and often necessary for publication in internationally recognized economics journals.”