Saturday, January 31, 2026

Tobacco banned in Indian state of Odisha

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 Here's the story from the Times of India, Govt notifies ban on all chewable tobacco, nicotine products | Bhubaneswar News - The Times o...
Friday, January 30, 2026

Tim Harford on British queues (and how queues get long)

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 Here's a column in the FT on congestion and growing queue length, which (also) shows why Tim Harford is one of my favorite economics ...
Thursday, January 29, 2026

Alex Chan on market design and organ transplants (and how to begin a video)

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Alex Chan, at HBS:)  https://youtu.be/8n6A9wO1yt0?si=VsaT0AVNgYc7VdnB
Wednesday, January 28, 2026

Redesigning transplant and OPO center incentives (Chan and Roth in JAMA; Bae, Sweat, Melcher and Ashlagi in JAMA Surgery)

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  Chan A, Roth AE. Reimagining Transplant Center Incentives Beyond the CMS IOTA Model. JAMA. Published online January 26, 2026. doi:10.1001...
Tuesday, January 27, 2026

Jennifer Mnookin to be Columbia University's next president

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Among President Mnookin's many accomplishments is one that I haven't seen mentioned in the announcements of her appointment.     Her...
Monday, January 26, 2026

Repugnance: two overviews (one by humans, one by Ai)

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Here are two overviews of repugnance, one by economists in a forthcoming book chapter, and one from xAi via its large language model, in Gro...
Sunday, January 25, 2026

Peer review isn't sufficient to detect/deter fraud in science

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 Economists shouldn't be surprised that, in many fields of science, there is some incidence of deliberate fraud.  Being a scientist is a...
Saturday, January 24, 2026

Organ attack (the game)

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 Here's a game that looks like it could be a gift for the organ trafficker in your life. (It was sent to me by a former student.)  The s...
Friday, January 23, 2026

Noam Nisan and Ariel Procaccia recognized as ACM Fellows

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The  Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has named a new cohort of Fellows ,  including Noam Nisan and Ariel Procaccia , who will be ...
Thursday, January 22, 2026

Kidney exchange in Brazil (a clinical trial)

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Here's a video in which Mike Rees , the founder of the Alliance for Paired Kidney Donation ( APKD ) describes how (with the help of a g...
Wednesday, January 21, 2026

How will the Army build AI and robotics expertise in uniform?

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 The US armed services have an unusual labor market.  Most soldiers, sailers, airmen and now space forcers join the military pretty much rig...
Tuesday, January 20, 2026

The job market for economists, 2026

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 The WSJ has the story: Economists Are Studying the Slowing Job Market—and Feeling It Themselves Newly minted Ph.D.s tend to work for univer...
Monday, January 19, 2026

AEA Code of Conduct: (I can't answer "no" to all of the screening questions)

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 When I was president of the American Economic Association, we began to think it would be prudent to have a formal code of conduct (see the ...
Sunday, January 18, 2026

Copyright transfer clause: blacklisted countries

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Here's something I hadn't encountered before, in the copyright transfer form of a prominent international transplant journal: "...
Saturday, January 17, 2026

The post-Nobel career of Adam Riess, and controversies in cosmology

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The Atlantic has a story about a controversy in cosmology about the expansion of the universe, and whether its explanation requires the hypo...
Friday, January 16, 2026

Offering deceased donor transplants out of sequence when there is a chance the organ will (otherwise) be unutilized (Ashlagi and Roth in AJOB)

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  Itai Ashlagi and I weigh in on recent controversy about "out of sequence" offers of organs for transplant, with some ideas about...
Thursday, January 15, 2026

Transplant problems and public support for organ donation

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  The Kidney Transplant Collaborative is worried about the status of kidney transplants in the US.  Here's the statement they published...
Wednesday, January 14, 2026

Mike Luca reviews Judd Kessler's "Lucky by design" in the WSJ

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 In the WSJ, Mike Luca has a good book review of Judd Kessler's "Lucky by Design".   ‘Lucky by Design’ Review: The Game of Get...
Tuesday, January 13, 2026

The administration takes its eye off medical journals (TACOs can be good)

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The war against science hasn't just focused on research universities, but also on scientific journals. (The concern with journals is tha...
Monday, January 12, 2026

History of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF)

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 The NSF has played a key role in American science, and risks being collateral damage in the war against science. Here is a their history we...