The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) publishes a widely read series of working papers, before publication in refereed journals. They also distribute a list of papers that have been published in medical journals, since those journals don't allow prepublication in working papers. For both these series the NBER has a rule against papers that make policy recommendations.
This is sometimes a problem for the field of market design, since practical market design is about finding ways to improve the operation of markets, which is a kind of policy advice. I encountered this recently with the two papers described below, published in medical journals, which apparently are too policy related: the policy being to save more lives by arranging more transplants, in this case of hearts and kidneys respectively. (Medical journals have their own conventions, but aren't opposed to advice on medical practice...)
I received the following email from the NBER, accompanied by a line of explanation for each paper.
The email began:
"I apologize for my belated response about your journal articles; while the subject matter is clearly vital, after review of the full-text, we determined that your articles make policy recommendations that are too specific for NBER’s policy on working papers (which we apply to papers in the article list)."
It then continued by highlighting the offending sentences in each article:
1. Alyssa Power MD*, Kurt R. Sweat MA*, Alvin Roth PhD, John C. Dykes MD, Beth Kaufman MD, Michael Ma MD, Sharon Chen MD, MPH, Seth A. Hollander MD, Elizabeth Profita MD, David N Rosenthal MD, Lynsey Barkoff NP, Chiu-Yu Chen MD PhD, Ryan R. Davies MD, Christopher S. Almond MD, MPH, “Contemporary Pediatric Heart Transplant Waitlist Mortality,” Journal of the American College of Cardiology, Vol 84, no. 7, August 13, 2024: 620-632.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0735109724075624
"Policy language: A more flexible allocation system that accurately reflects patient-specific risks and considers transplant benefit is urgently needed."
2. Vivek B. Kute, Himanshu V Patel, Subho Banerjee,Divyesh P Engineer, Ruchir B Dave, Nauka Shah, Sanshriti Chauhan ,Harishankar Meshram , Priyash Tambi , Akash Shah, Khushboo Saxena,Manish Balwani , Vishal Parmar, Shivam Shah, Ved Prakash ,Sudeep Patel, Dev Patel, Sudeep Desai, Jamal Rizvi , Harsh Patel, Beena Parikh, Kamal Kanodia, Shruti Gandhi, Michael A Rees, Alvin E Roth, Pranjal Modi “Impact of single centre kidney-exchange transplantation to increase living donor pool in India: A cohort study involving non-anonymous allocation,”Nephrology, September 2024,https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nep.14380
"Policy language: We suggest stepwise progress to achieve multicentre, regional, State and then a National program. Ideally, there should be engagement by the National Organ & Tissue Transplant Organization and the World Health Organization.
While we recommend simultaneous surgery for mDRPs in a single exchange, sometimes logistical aspects have necessitated non-simultaneous exchanges"
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