Sunday, May 31, 2020

What values do we bequeath to our grandchildren? Alberto Alesina et al. on the generations following the Cultural Revolution in China

›
In what is perhaps the last paper he completed before his recent untimely death on May 23 from a heart attack, Alberto Alesina (1957-2020) ...
Saturday, May 30, 2020

Discussiong the pandemic with the Indian magazine Open

›
The Indian magazine Open published a brief interview with me, conducted by email: ‘Not only is wealth inequality rising, but the conseq...
Friday, May 29, 2020

Human Challenge Trials for COVID-19 vaccines

›
Yesterday I blogged about trying to speed up vaccine development and distribution by taking some of the risk out of it for pharma companies...
Thursday, May 28, 2020

Advanced market commitment for a successful COVID-19 vaccine

›
Vaccines take a long time to develop and test, and so are risky for pharmaceutical firms to invest in. Here's a NY Times op-ed by sever...
Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Convalescent plasma collection ramps up

›
Here's a story from the WSJ: Blood Banks, Pharma Join Microsoft to Sign Up Covid-19 Survivors for Plasma "A coalition of resear...
Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Incentive compatibility is not enough: evidence from the Israeli matching market for psychologists, by Hassidim, Romm and Shorrer

›
While it has taken some time for this paper to be published, I think it was the first to discover that some applicants in a labor market cl...
Monday, May 25, 2020

India NDTV interview on coronavirus, convalescent plasma, etc. (5 minute interview by Dr. Prannoy Roy)

›
My 5 minutes come at 1:12, but if I've embedded this right the video should begin from there when you start it...
Sunday, May 24, 2020

Olly Williamson (1932-2020)

›
The great student of transaction costs, Oliver (Olly) Williamson, has died. Here's the Berkeley obit: Nobel laureate Oliver Williams...
Saturday, May 23, 2020

Should emergency medical supplies go to the highest bidders? (That isn't necessarily what economists think...)

›
Should prices clear markets for emergency medical supplies? Many economists don't think so: Prices of Medical Supplies "About ...
Friday, May 22, 2020

What makes a market transaction morally repugnant? by Leuker, Samartzidis, and Hertwig

›
Here's a new working paper on repugnance, from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. What makes a market transact...
Thursday, May 21, 2020

Blood and plasma: a brief history, from 1628

›
With all my discussion of convalescent plasma for Covid-19 this week*, here's a historical perspective on the technology and changes in...
Wednesday, May 20, 2020

Convalescent plasma collection and distribution

›
Efforts to collect and distribute convalescent plasma from recovered Covid-19 patients are ramping up: there are lots of options. I do...
Tuesday, May 19, 2020

Surrogacy amidst the corona virus pandemic lockdowns

›
The coronavirus pandemic isn't only a story about disease, it's also a story about lockdowns, and restrictions on travel (among oth...
Monday, May 18, 2020

Qingyun Wu defends his dissertation--remotely

›
Qingyun Wu successfully defended his dissertation at Stanford today, remotely, as we are all sheltering in place from the coronavirus pande...

Plasma and plasma products (such as antibodies) are a big business (and the U.S. dominates the international market)

›
These days I'm thinking about corona virus covid-19 convalescent blood plasma, which I blogged about yesterday, and about which I hope ...
Sunday, May 17, 2020

Cascades of convalescent plasma for Covid-19, and chains of exchanges, by Kominers, Pathak, Sönmez, and Ünver

›
Covid-19 convalescent plasma is a new thing in the world, that came into existence only when the first human was infected and recovered fro...
Saturday, May 16, 2020

Transplants dropped as Covid-19 rose, in France and the U.S.

›
In France, even more than in the U.S., kidney transplants were considered elective surgery. In the Lancet: Organ procurement and transp...
Friday, May 15, 2020

Search and matching models of marriage (with emphasis on search or on matching)

›
Often when economic theorists (particularly matching theorists) speak of "marriage" we don't mean the real thing, we mean a m...
Thursday, May 14, 2020

Does the porn industry provide a model for disease testing and contact tracing to end corona virus lockdowns?

›
The adult film industry--which produces films in which performers engage in sex with one another--has a testing service called PASS (Perfo...
Wednesday, May 13, 2020

College admissions, late in the season

›
Each year, around this time of year, as the main round of college admissions comes to a conclusion, NACAC (the National Association for Col...