Global kidney exchange celebrated together with the Declaration of Istanbul, in the AJT

Here's the recent AJT Report from the American Journal of Transplantation,

which touches on various aspects of kidney politics, including global kidney exchange:

Ten‐Year Celebration ofthe Declaration of Istanbul

Lara C. Pullen

First published: 29 October 2018

https://doi.org/10.1111/ajt.15138

Abstract  "This month's installment of “The AJT Report” discusses updates to the Declaration of Istanbul on this key achievement's 10th anniversary. We also report on Italy's recommendation earlier this year regarding the Global Kidney Exchange, and join the transplantation community in bidding farewell to writer and “The AJT Report” originator, Susan Pondrom."

Here's the part about Global Kidney Exchange :

"

Italy Recommends Global Kidney Exchange to the World Health Organization

"In January 2018, Italy recommended a proposal for a global kidney exchange (GKE) to the World Health Organization (WHO).1 The recommendation was part of a collection of statements submitted by Member States and other participants of the 142nd session of the WHO Executive Board.

"Michael Rees, MD, PhD, a kidney transplant surgeon at the University of Toledo Medical Center in Ohio, and Alvin Roth, PhD, a Nobel Prize–winning economist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, launched GKE to address the reality that poverty is the biggest global barrier to transplantation and to develop a means for poor people from developing countries to donate and receive organs.2 At its core, GKE is a system to support transplant surgeons in their efforts to help people who are not only very sick and dying, but also too poor to afford dialysis. The system is also controversial in the transplantation community and has been associated with logistical barriers. Even so, Dr. Rees and Dr. Roth remain dedicated to seeing the system developed and implemented around the world.

"The statement from Italy represents a significant endorsement of GKE. It notes that internationally, 2 million to 7 million people die annually from kidney failure, and that kidney disease and other noncommunicable diseases have replaced communicable diseases as the most common causes of premature death worldwide. However, as billions of dollars are spent in low/middle‐income countries (LMICs) to reduce the burden of communicable diseases, significantly less is spent on noncommunicable diseases such as kidney failure. The statement asserts that not only is transplantation the preferred treatment for kidney failure, but that kidney exchange makes it possible to extend the reach of living donation, and for healthy living donors whose kidneys are incompatible with loved ones to exchange their kidneys for those that are compatible with the people they love.

"The first of Italy's action items stated, “We encourage WHO to include organs and in particular kidney transplantation in its program as we believe that oversight, cooperation and assistance of the WHO to carry out a pilot program with strong international governance that is consistent with the highest ethical and legal standard, and that carefully approves participating countries, facilities, healthcare providers and patient–donor pairs should be conceived and implemented.” Italy's statement referred to GKE, noting that such a program allows patients to receive a compatible kidney from another patient's donor. The statement also noted that the savings attained in high‐income countries could support long‐term care of the LMIC donor and recipient in their home country.

"This request sits in conflict with the 2017 Statement of the Declaration of Istanbul Custodian Group concerning ethical objections to the proposed GKE Program.3"

• 1Italian Government. Statement from Italy. WHO, Geneva, Switzerland, 2018. Retrieved from http://apps.who.int/gb/statements/eb142/PDF/22/Italy-3.1.pdf.
• 2Pullen LC. Global kidney exchange: Overcoming the barrier of poverty. Am J Transplant. 2017;17:2499‐2500.
  Wiley Online LibraryPubMedWeb of Science®Google ScholarFind it @ Stanford
• 3Declaration of Istanbul Custodian Group. Statement of the Declaration of Istanbul Custodian Group Concerning Ethical Objections to the Proposed Global Kidney Exchange Program. 2017. Retrieved from https://www.declarationofistanbul.org/resources/policy-documents/795-statement-of-the-declaration-of-istan-bul-custodian-group-concerning-ethical-objections-to-the-proposed-global-kidney-exchange-program
• ***********
• The statement by the group that calls itself the 'Declaration of Istanbul Custodian Group,' is a very strange document: it opposes GKE, on the basis of a series of misleading, confused and sometimes outright false statements about it, and recommends that patients in poor countries who presently cannot afford transplantation should wait until their countries become wealthy enough to provide transplantation to all their citizens domestically, for fear that they would be exploited by being allowed to participate in what for them would be life-saving kidney exchange in countries that have it.
• Of course, the goal of having all nations able to adequately take care of their citizens who need transplants is worth working towards. No nation can yet claim to have reached that point, and international cooperation is a step in that direction.

See all my posts on Global Kidney Exchange here.

Repugnance watch: Dwarf tossing and the DC Circuit Court of Appeals

When I first wrote about repugnant transactions in Roth (2007), dwarf tossing was among the examples I used.  Many blog posts about repugnance later, it was with a sense of recognition that I read the following story from Mother Jones about President Trump's latest nomination to the federal appellate courts:

Trump’s Nominee to Replace Kavanaugh Is a Staunch Defender of Dwarf-Tossing
Neomi Rao is best known as Trump’s anti-regulation czar, but she’s a veteran of the culture wars.

"Neomi Rao, Trump’s nominee to replace Brett Kavanaugh on the powerful DC Circuit, who has written at least two law review articles and a blog post in which she defended dwarf-tossing.

"Especially popular in Florida bars, dwarf-tossing is the strange spectacle in which competitors throw Velcro-clad little people at a wall or mattress like a shotput. The longest toss wins. The sport has been banned in some American states and parts of France, where a judge upheld such bansbecause of “considerations of human dignity.” Rao considers these laws an affront to individual liberty that fails to recognize the right of the dwarf to be tossed. In one article, she wrote that the decision in France upholding the dwarf-tossing ban was an example of “dignity as coercion” and that it “demonstrates how concepts of dignity can be used to coerce individuals by forcing upon them a particular understanding of dignity.”

"Dwarf-tossing is an odd cause for a federal judicial nominee to champion. Even weirder, Rao has invoked it repeatedly in her writing to make the case that a misguided focus on human dignity is leading US courts to run afoul of the Constitution in decisions that advance LGBT rights and racial equality. "

HT: Kim Krawiec

Congratulations to Fuhito Kojima, on the Enjoji Jiro Memorial Prize

My colleague Fuhito Kojima has a lot to be congratulated on lately, and today comes another cause for congratulations.  He shares the 5th Enjoji Jiro Memorial Prize by the Japan Center for Economic Research. The prize recognizes 'young and mid-level economists under 45 years of age who have made achievements in the field of economic theory, and have a promising future.'

Here's the story from today's Nikkei Shimbun Morning Paper:

第5回「円城寺次郎記念賞」 小島・渡辺両氏に

2018/11/18付

日本経済新聞　朝刊

"The 5th "Jiroji Jiro Memorial Award" To Mr. Kojima and Mr. Watanabe"

Congratulations, Fuhito!

**********
I used Google translate to translate the headline, but for the following paragraph it had trouble with a word that I gather in this context means "between junior and senior in age/career," which came out as saying that Fuhito is a "young and medium-sized economist ." (The description of the prize above comes from an English language report on the 2009 prize...)

The resident match can be confusing, in PNAS by Alex Rees-Jones and Samuel Skowronek

Here's a recent paper in PNAS, |
An experimental investigation of preference misrepresentation in the residency match
Alex Rees-Jones and Samuel Skowronek
www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1803212115

"The development and deployment of matching procedures that incentivize truthful preference reporting is considered one of the major successes of market design research. In this study, we test the degree to which these procedures succeed in eliminating preference misrepresentation. We administered an online experiment to 1,714 medical students immediately after their participation in the medical residency match—a leading field application of strategy-proof market design. When placed in an analogous, incentivized matching task, we find that 23% of participants misrepresent their preferences. We explore the factors that predict preference misrepresentation, including cognitive ability, strategic positioning, overconfidence, expectations, advice, and trust. We discuss the implications of this behavior for the design of allocation mechanisms and the social welfare in markets that use them

Black markets for marijuana in Canada, where marijuana is now legal

Here are some accounts of the bumpy road to a thick legal market for marijuana:

From the NY Times, on how stores continue to sell not yet legalized products still available on the black market:
Vancouver, Canada’s Marijuana Capital, Struggles to Tame the Black Market

From the Guardian, on the shortage of legal product in face of strong demand:
Weed woes: Canada struggles to meet huge demand for legal cannabis
Numerous stores dealing with empty shelves and disgruntled customers, with fears many consumers will turn to black market

“Now that we can’t supply them, they’re still going to find it,” [a legal supplier with empty shelves] said. “There’s no shortage of weed in Labrador City. Just the legal stuff.”

Xenotransplants: the (evergreen) promise of transplantable organs from pigs

Wouldn't it be great if the shortage of transplantable organs could be fixed by figuring out how to grow them in farm animals? (Yes, that would raise a bunch of issues of its own, but so does meat eating...)

The NY Times has the story of how that might be closer than it has been in the past:
20 AMERICANS DIE EACH DAY WAITING FOR ORGANS. CAN PIGS SAVE THEM?
THANKS TO GENETICALLY ENGINEERED PIGS, THE DONOR-ORGAN SHORTAGE COULD SOON BE A THING OF THE PAST.


It includes lots of promising news, and this observation:
“The joke about xenotransplantation is that it’s always just around the corner, and it always will be,” says Parsia Vagefi, the chief of surgical transplantation at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. “But recent progress has been so remarkable that for first time it feels like we’re on the verge of a definitive solution to the organ crisis.”
*************

And of course, note that many more than 20 Americans die each day due to a shortage of organs:

Wednesday, November 14, 2018

The Terrible Toll of the Kidney Shortage, by McCormick, Held and Chertow

The law and economics of market design: conference in Mannheim November 15-16

The program is here, but for some reason I can't copy it.
Kim Krawiec and Peter Cramton will be giving keynote addresses.

Market design seems like a natural for a conference on law and economics...

The Terrible Toll of the Kidney Shortage, by McCormick, Held and Chertow

An editorial in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology counts the high human costs of the kidney shortage in terms not only of deaths among those on the waiting list for a deceased donor transplant, but also among the other three-fourths of kidney failure patients who are not added to the waiting list but who would medically benefit from a transplant.

The Terrible Toll of the Kidney Shortage,
by Frank McCormick, Philip J. Held, and Glenn M. Chertow

"to see the full extent of the harm done by the kidney shortage and the potential benefit from ending it, let us assume that 50% of those who are diagnosed with ESRD could medically benefit from a transplant. (This assumption is consistent with the findings of Schold et al. 5 that, if all of the patients on dialysis who have a life expectancy of >5 years were placed on the kidney waiting list, the number on the list would almost double.) Thus, half of the 126,000 patients who are currently diagnosed with ESRD each year—63,000 patients—might medically benefit from a transplant. However,if only 20,000 patients per year receive a transplant, the remaining 43,000 would join the growing toll of those who die prematurely because of the kidney shortage. To put this in perspective, this is the same death toll as from 85 fully loaded 747s crashing each year.

*************

See my earlier post on earlier, defining work on the costs of the organ shortage:

Saturday, October 17, 2015

A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Government Compensation of Kidney Donors by Held, McCormick, Ojo, and Roberts

Welfare of sophisticated versus naive players revisited, by Babaioff, Gonczarowski, and Romm

Here's a new paper with a nuanced view of how well sophisticated players may do in a non-strategy-proof mechanism:

Playing on a level field: Sincere and sophisticated players in the Boston mechanism with a coarse priority structure
Moshe Babaioff, Yannai A. Gonczarowski, Assaf Romm∗
October 15, 2018

Abstract: Who gains and who loses from a manipulable school choice mechanism? We examine this question with a focus on the outcomes for sincere and sophisticated students,and present results concerning their absolute and relative gains under the manipulable Boston Mechanism (BM) as compared with the strategy-proof Deferred Acceptance (DA). The absolute gain of a student of a certain type is the difference between her expected utility under (an equilibrium of) BM and her utility under (the dominant strategy quilibrium of) DA. Holding everything else constant, one type of a player has relative gain with respect to another type if her absolute gain is higher. Prior theoretical works presented inconclusive results regarding the absolute gains of both types of students, and predicted (or assumed) positive relative gains for sophisticated types compared to sincere types. The empirical evidence is also mixed, with different markets exhibiting very different behaviors. We extend the previous results and explain the inconsistent empirical findings using a large random market approach. We provide robust and generic results of the “anything goes” variety for markets with a coarse priority structure. That is, in such markets there are many sincere and sophisticated students who prefer BM to DA (positive absolute gain), and vice versa (negative absolute gain). Furthermore, some populations may even get a relative gain from being sincere (and being perceived as such). We conclude by studying market forces that can influence the choice between the two mechanisms.

MIT School choice summit: Nov. 13

A big group of academics and practitioners involved in school choice will gather in Cambridge to take stock of what we have learned, and still hope to learn, about school choice.

MIT SCHOOL ACCESS AND QUALITY SUMMIT 2018

"November 13, 2018 | Cambridge, MA
The MIT School Access and Quality Summit will focus on school enrollment strategies that can increase access and generate data to improve portfolio planning and the measurement of school effectiveness. Researchers will present new findings on the impact of policy interventions, and policymakers will share their experiences with implementation. Through these conversations, we hope to spark long-term partnerships between researchers and practitioners, and prompt continuous interaction between rigorous research and policy design, implementation, and evaluation."

Tuesday, November 13

9:00 AM  Welcome and Introduction
Ian Waitz, Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate and Graduate Education, MIT

9:15 AM  Leveraging Enrollment Mechanisms to Evaluate Impact
Joshua Angrist, Director, School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative
Parag Pathak, Director, School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative

9:45 AM  Simplifying Enrollment in Chicago: A First Look at the Adoption of GoCPS
Lisa Barrow, Senior Economist, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
Tony T. Howard, III, Executive Director of Enrollment and Education Policy, Chicago Public Schools

10:45 AM  Break

11:00 AM  Keynote
Richard Carranza, Chancellor, of New York City Department of Education

11:30 Taking Stock of School Choice Reforms
Neil Dorosin, Executive Director, Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice

12:00 PM  Working Lunch

Case Consultancies
Introduction by Carrie Conaway, Chief Research and Strategy Officer, Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education

1:30 PM  Improving School Quality in Camden
Paymon Rouhanifard, Former Superintendent, Camden City School District

2:00 PM Evidence on the Determinants and Consequences of School Choice from Washington DC
Steven Glazerman, Senior Policy Fellow, Mathematica Policy Research
Dallas Dotter, Researcher, Mathematica Policy Research
Claudia Luján, Deputy Chief, Strategic School Planning and Enrollment, District of Columbia Public Schools

3:00 PM  Break

3:15 PM  Leveling the Playing Field for High School Admissions in New York City
Sarah Cohodes, Assistant Professor of Education and Public Policy, Columbia University
Nadiya Chadha, Director of High School Admissions Research and Policy, New York City Department of Education

4:15 PM  Developing a National Research Agenda for Access and Choice
Douglas Harris, Director, The National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice

***********
Update: here's a Nov. 20 news report from MIT following the conference:
Exploring school choice
MIT School Access and Quality Summit brings policymakers, educators, and researchers together to examine strategies and ways to measure effectiveness.

Repugnance watch: Greyhound racing banned (even) in Florida

Florida had an active greyhound racing industry, now banned by referendum:
Here's the story from the Orlando Sentinal:
How vote to end Florida greyhound racing won and what comes next

"After years of failing to push greyhound racing reform through the Florida Legislature, animal-welfare advocates took their mission directly to the state’s voters this week — scoring such a decisive victory that proponents say it signals the eventual end of the sport across the country.

“A 69-percent vote in Florida — a state with a still-conservative electorate — shows that this is now unstoppable,” said Carey Theil, executive director of GREY2K USA, the main force behind the Yes on 13 campaign to support the racing ban. “It sends a message not only to the remaining dog tracks in the nation but all around the world that dogs are members of our families and we will not tolerate industries that harm them.
...
"Florida’s 11 active dog tracks will have until Jan. 1, 2021, to phase out their live greyhound racing. They’ll still be able to race horses, if their tracks can accommodate the event, and they’ll still be able to have wagering on simulcast races from other tracks, including from dog tracks in the five remaining states where the practice is still active and legal."
*******

A NY Times article begins by considering the problem of rehoming the racing dogs who will be retired, but includes an interesting feature of the industry that has kept dog racing active in Florida:

Thousands of Greyhounds May Need Homes as Florida Bans Racing

"Florida’s tracks remained in part because of state laws that require them to continue racing in order to keep their lucrative gambling operations. In Florida, only existing “parimutuel” facilities like dog tracks and horse tracks could obtain licenses to operate card rooms and slots."

Obvious manipulations by Pete Troyan and Thayer Morrill

Here's a paper motivated by the fact that (obviously:) there are going to be many more mechanisms that aren't obviously manipulable than there are mechanisms that are obviously strategy proof, or even strategy proof...

Obvious Manipulations
Peter Troyan, Thayer Morrill∗ (*in random order)
October 3, 2018

Abstract: A mechanism is strategy-proof if agents can never profitably manipulate, in any state of the world; however, not all non-strategy-proof
mechanisms are equally easy to manipulate - some are more “obviously”
manipulable than others. We propose a formal definition of an obvious
manipulation and argue that it may be advantageous for designers to
tolerate some manipulations, so long as they are non-obvious. By doing
so, improvements can be achieved on other key dimensions, such as
efficiency and fairness, without significantly compromising incentives.
We classify common non-strategy-proof mechanisms as either obviously
manipulable (OM) or not obviously manipulable (NOM), and show that
this distinction is both tractable and in-line with empirical realities
regarding the success of manipulable mechanisms in practical market
design settings

"Intuitively, a manipulation ...is classified as “obvious” if it either makes
the agent strictly better off in the worst case ...or it makes the agent strictly better off in the best case..."

Marijuana scores some gains in the voting booth

The NY Times has the story:
Marijuana Embraced in Michigan, Utah and Missouri, but Rejected in North Dakota

"Marijuana initiatives appeared on ballots in four states in the midterm elections. In Michigan and North Dakota, initiatives gave voters the opportunity to legalize marijuana for recreational use. In Missouri and Utah, voters chose whether to allow people who are sick to use the drug for medical reasons."

See my earlier post:

Friday, October 6, 2017

Marijuana in America--getting less repugnant with each election

Arrow lecture at Columbia University this evening

The 11th Annual Kenneth J. Arrow Lecture | Market Design in Large Worlds: The Example of Kidney Exchange
Thursday, November 8, 2018
6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
International Affairs Building, 420 W. 118 St., New York, NY 10027 1501


Please join us for the 11th Annual Kenneth J. Arrow Lecture delivered by Alvin Roth, the 2012 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences and Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University, on "Market Design in Large Worlds: The Example of Kidney Exchange."
Discussants: Parag Pathak, Jane Berkowitz Carlton and Dennis William Carlton Professor of Microeconomics at MIT
Joseph E. Stiglitz, 2001 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences and University Professor at Columbia University Description:

Abstract: "Marketplaces are often small parts of large markets, and so potential marketplace participants may have large strategy sets, that include actions taken outside of the marketplace. And markets require social support, so the behavior of people who do not intend to participate in the market may nevertheless be important for market design. This lecture will illustrate these points with some examples, drawing most heavily on the experience of kidney exchange."

About the Kenneth J. Arrow Lecture Series: Kenneth J. Arrow’s work has shaped the course of economics for the past sixty years so deeply that, in a sense, every modern economist is his student. His ideas, style of research, and breadth of vision have been a model for generations of the boldest, most creative, and most inventive economists. His work has yielded such seminal theorems as general equilibrium, social choice, and endogenous growth, proving that simple ideas have a profound impact. The Kenneth J. Arrow Lecture Series highlights economists, from Nobel laureates to groundbreaking younger scholars, whose work builds on Arrow’s scholarship as well as his innovative spirit. The books in the series are an expansion of the lectures that are held in Arrow's honor at Columbia University.

Kidney exchange needs to be conducted at scale, in Vox

Nikhil Agarwal, Itai Ashlagi, Eduardo Azevedo, Clayton Featherstone,  and Omer Karaduman summarize their recent paper in Vox..eu:

Market failure in kidney exchange
03 November 2018

National kidney exchange platforms significantly boost the number of life-saving kidney transplants by finding complicated exchange arrangements that are not possible within any single hospital. This column examines US data and finds that the majority of kidney exchanges continue to be performed within hospitals, suggesting a fragmented market that comes at a large efficiency cost. National platforms may need to be redesigned to encourage full participation, with reimbursement reform.

Discussion of marijuana in the U.K.--a police chief looks ahead

Now that medical marijuana is legal, can legal recreational use be far behind?  The Guardian has the story.
Former Met police chief urges rethink on cannabis
Bernard Hogan-Howe says there is clear evidence to warrant review of prohibition

"He said: “We already know from the evidence around the world that where people use it for medicinal purposes, it slides into recreational. Surely it’s better that we get ready for that potential change.”

"His intervention follows the legalisation of recreational cannabis in Canada last week, its decriminalisation in Uruguay, Portugal and in several US states, and the relaxation of cannabis laws in the UK to allow the prescription of cannabis-based medicines from next month.
...
"Hogan-Howe joins a growing list of prominent figures who have cast doubt on the coherence of the UK’s approach to enforcing laws that are often ignored with impunity, given that a number of police forces have publicly said they would not prosecute perpetrators of low-level cannabis offences."

The case for compensating Australian plasma donors, by Bob Slonim

Here's Bob Slonim, explaining the current situation in Australia, of unpaid Australian plasma donors, and big imports of plasma products from countries in which donors are paid:

How Australia can fix the market for plasma and save millions

"The National Blood Authority’s 2016-2017 annual report indicates Australian imports of immunoglobulin, a plasma component, provide 44% of domestic demand. This costs A$120 million while the remaining 56% comes from domestic supply costing A$413 million.

"This implies the domestic supply of immunoglobulin costs over three times more per unit than what is imported, despite domestic donors not being compensated."

Waze carpool--launched nationwide

At the NBER market design conference, Michael Schwarz spoke of market design with his practioner hat on (he's Microsoft's chief economist, and former chief scientist at Waze when he worked for Google). He points out the importance of reducing transaction costs, because "enormous [potential] markets may consist of tiny transactions."

Speaking of which, he points out that Waze carpool went live throughout the U.S. last month.

Here's a story: Waze launches carpool service across the U.S.

"Carpooling isn’t just a smart way to cut down on weekly expenditures. It’s also good for the planet: Sharing a car with coworkers, friends, or neighbors keeps 1,600 pounds of greenhouse gas out of the air each year. And if 100 people were to take advantage of a carpool every day, it’d eliminate 1,320 pounds of carbon monoxide and a whopping 2,376,000 pounds of carbon dioxide.

That’s one of the reasons Google-owned navigation platform Waze hopes to lower the barrier to entry. Starting today, it’s launching Waze Carpool, a ridesharing platform it hopes will one day eliminate traffic congestion — and by extension pollution — across the U.S. in all 50 states. The rollout follows successful pilot tests in Israel, California, Texas, Washington, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Nevada."

Some Portuguese press on kidney exchange and market design

When I was in Lisbon I gave two talks, and some interviews.  Here's a nice story written after both my talks:
O que tem a economia a ver com transplantes de rins? Tudo [What Does The Economy Have To Do With Kidney Transplants? Everything.]
by SÓNIA M. LOURENÇO (whose sister once took my experimental economics class at Harvard)

Here's a story that followed the first talk, which was part of an honorary degree ceremony.
A ciência económica ao serviço do amor, saúde e felicidade
by Sandra Maximiano
[G translate: Economic science at the service of love, health and happiness]
Here's a video and some photos of the whole event...

And I gave a tv interview in which the interviewer wished to ignore my pre-interview insistence to talk about game theory and market design and the conference in Portugal as opposed to the recession and recovery, and Italy...(but we reached a sort of compromise...)*

Nobel da Economia em entrevista à TVI critica populismos e alerta para mais migração
Alvin Roth referiu ainda que o fenómeno do aquecimento global vai aumentar a migração.
[G translate: Nobel la Economía in interview with TVI criticizes populism and alert for more migration

Alvin Roth also noted that the phenomenon of global warming will increase migration.]
*************

Private equity job offers to young investment bankers unravel earlier this year, while investment banks try to stem their own unraveling

Two stories from the WSJ about unraveling, at different parts of the financial industry.

1. The WSJ has publishes this year's unraveling story earlier than last year's...

No Experience? No Problem. Private Equity Lures Newbie Bankers With $300,000 Offers.
Annual recruitment drive starts earlier this year as firms try to get a jump on preferred candidates

"An industrywide scramble is under way this week to hire young investment bankers.

"The instigator was Thoma Bravo LLC, which extended its first job offers this past weekend, according to people familiar with the matter. Word spread quickly to rivals, and by Monday interviews were under way at nearly every big firm, including Blackstone Group LP, Apollo Global Management LLC, Carlyle Group LP and TPG.

"Welcome to private equity’s annual recruitment, the frenzied window of interviews and fast-expiring job offers that firms use to fill their junior ranks. The candidates graduated college as recently as last spring and landed at Wall Street investment-banking desks just weeks ago.

"Those lucky enough to get offers will finish their two-year bank analyst programs and start at private-equity firms in the summer of 2020...
...
"Recruiting used to take place during the summer, once applicants had at least a year of experience under their belts. But it has crept earlier as firms try to get a jump on preferred candidates. In 2014, interviews began in February. Last year, recruiting started before Christmas. Applicants describe a frantic period of interviews and “exploding” offers that can expire in 24 hours or less.
**********

2. The investment banks also hire very early in students' college careers, and here's a story about an attempt to resist that urge (good luck with that):

 Goldman, JPMorgan Hit Pause on Intern Recruiting ‘Madness’
A push in recent years to move up application deadlines isn’t bringing in the kinds of candidates the banks need

"Two Wall Street investment banks are easing up in the race to hire their most junior employees.

"Goldman Sachs Group Inc.  and JPMorgan Chase & Co. won’t interview or extend summer internship offers to college sophomores this year and will go back to recruiting students in the fall of their junior year, executives said.

"It is a nod to a softer Wall Street, eager to cast off its sweatbox image to compete with perk-happy Silicon Valley. It is also an acknowledgment that a push in recent years to move up application deadlines isn’t bringing in the kinds of candidates banks need as they try to diversify their overwhelmingly white and male ranks.

“We were contributing to an environment that pressured students to choose rather than to explore,” said Dane Holmes, Goldman’s top human-resources executive. “I want people who want to be at Goldman Sachs, not people who felt they had to say yes to an offer.”

Harvard admissions on trial--dualing economist expert witnesses, interesting details

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has the story:
Dueling Economists: Rival Analyses of Harvard’s Admissions Process Emerge at Trial
There are many strands to this story (and it seems to be ungated), but here I'll just note a few interesting admissions stats.

"Of the 37,000 applicants for admission to the Class of 2019, for instance, 8,200 had perfect grade-point averages, and more than 2,700 had perfect scores on the verbal section of the SAT. But Harvard had only about 1,700 spots to offer. Even if the university wished to consider only grades and test scores, it would be hard-pressed to select a freshman class using those variables alone.
...
"The two economists’ analyses vary in several ways. Perhaps most significant, their respective models include different kinds of applicants. Arcidiacono excludes recruited athletes, the children of alumni, the children of Harvard faculty and staff members, and students on a special list that includes children of donors.

"Card includes them. Though the total number of students who fit those descriptions represents a small fraction of the applicant pool (5 percent), they account for a large proportion of accepted students (29 percent).

EconTrack: The AEA's Job Market Information Board

The AEA has launched a job market information board, which will collect information about the progress of interviews and flyouts for (I imagine) jobs that advertise in the JOE.

Here it is:  EconTrack: The AEA's Job Market Information Board, and the headings for the information they hope to track as the job market develops are these:

Institution, Job Title, Fields, Application Deadline, Interviewing at ASSA?, Interview Invitations Issued, Campus Visits Issued, List of Campus Invitees...

The (hot) job market for "Digitization Economists"

HBS interviews Mike Luca on the market for new economists (and his recent paper with Susan Athey):
Hunting for a Hot Job in High Tech? Try 'Digitization Economist'

"Some 50 tech companies “have been snapping up economists at a remarkable scale,” says Michael Luca, the Lee J. Styslinger III Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. “All of the big Bay Area tech companies have teams of economists, and lots of the smaller companies are starting to hire handfuls of them.” The list includes Google, Microsoft, Airbnb, Uber, Facebook, and numerous smaller companies.

"Tech companies are turning to sharp economic minds to provide their unique lens on business problems like advertising auctions and market design. The accelerating phenomenon has given rise to a new field within economics called the economics of digitization. Research from the field is quickly finding its way into practice, directly through the work of PhD economists, and in the classroom, as HBS and other business schools add more tech-germane courses to their MBA offerings."

Market design and development economics at Harvard

There's a two day conference at Harvard, called
Development Economics and Market Design 

Organizers: Scott Kominers, Natalia Rigol, Ben Roth, Alexander Teytelboym

 Program:
OCTOBER 28, 2018
9:00 to 9:15  Opening Remarks
9:15 to 10:15  Ride Sharing
Abhijit Banerjee MIT
Discussants
Elizabeth Mishkin Harvard University
10:15 to 10:30  Break
10:30 to 11:30  Credit/Targeting
Dilip Mookherjee Boston University
Sujata Visaria Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
11:30 to 11:45  Break
11:45 to 12:45 Fisheries
Jonathan Colmer University of Virginia
Discussants
Daniel Marszalec University of Tokyo
12:45 to 1:45 Lunch
1:45 to 2:45 Localized Markets/Information
Terence Johnson University of Notre Dame
Discussants
Vivek Bhattacharya Northwestern University
2:45 to 3:00 Break
3:00 to 4:00 Mobile Money
Tavneet Suri MIT
Discussants
Ran Shorrer Penn State University
4:00 to 4:15 Break
4:15 to 5:15 Development Medicine
Michael Kremer Harvard University
Christopher Snyder Dartmouth College
Discussants
Scott Kominers Harvard Business School
5:15 to 5:30 Open Discussion & Day 1 Closing Remarks

OCTOBER 29, 2018
9:00 to 10:00 Deforestation
Seema Jayachandran Northwestern University
Discussants
Alexander Teytelboym Department of Economics, University of Oxford
10:00 to 10:15 Break
10:15 to 11:15 Advice to Farmers
Shawn Cole Harvard University
Discussants
Shengwu Li Harvard University
11:15 to 11:30 Break
11:30 to 12:30 Labor Markets
Simon Quinn University of Oxford
Discussants
Eva Meyersson Milgrom Stanford University
12:30 to 1:30 Lunch
1:30 to 2:30 Coffee Commodity Markets
Ashok Rai Williams College
2:30 to 3:00
Discussion & Closing Remarks

Repugnance watch: Blasphemy no longer unconstitutional in Ireland, as of yesterday

Here's the story in The Guardian:
Ireland votes to oust ‘medieval’ blasphemy law
Decision is latest in ‘quiet revolution’ of seismic social and political changes in the country

"Campaigners in Ireland celebrated the end of a “medieval” ban on blasphemy on Saturday, after voters overwhelmingly supported a referendum to remove the offence from the constitution.

"Almost 65% of voters supported the move – a total of 951,650 people – with just over 35% (515,808) in favour of retaining it, on a turnout of just over 43%.
...
"The government had already laid out legislation to remove the offence of blasphemy from the constitution and all relevant laws, should the referendum be passed.

"It has been more than 150 years since anyone was prosecuted for blasphemy in Ireland, but the country had passed a blasphemy law in 2009, making it the only western democracy to bring in new legislation in the 21st century."

University of Virginia celebrates Charlie Holt

Thomas Jefferson would be proud:

"During the ceremony in the John Paul Jones Arena, held in conjunction with Family Weekend, UVA President Jim Ryan presented two Thomas Jefferson Awards – one for excellence in scholarship, to Charles A. Holt, A. Willis Robertson Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Economics and professor of public policy in the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy; and one for service to Richard M. Carpenter, patient care services manager at the UVA Medical Center. The awards are the highest given by UVA to a member of the University community."

Incentives can save lives (Washington Post op-ed with Congressman Cartwright)

The Washington Post published this week an opinion piece I coauthored with Congressman Matt Cartwright of Pennsylvania, in support of the new legislation he has proposed, H.R.6448 - Organ Donation Clarification Act of 2018.

Our piece ran under the headline
Student loan forgiveness and other incentives could save lives. Here’s how.
By Matt Cartwright and Al Roth
October 25
Matt Cartwright, a Democrat, represents Pennsylvania’s 17th District in the House. Al Roth, a professor at Stanford University, won the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics.

Here's the text as in ran in the paper:

"Every day 20 Americans will die waiting for an organ transplant, 13 of them waiting for a kidney. Hundreds of thousands will undergo painful and debilitating dialysis treatments to extend their lives in the hope that a kidney will eventually become available.

We are quickly marching in the wrong direction. As of mid-October,95,000 people remain on the kidney waiting list. Each year, approximately 17,000 patients are lucky enough to receive a transplant; however, 35,000 new patients are added annually to the national waitlist.

The average wait time for a new kidney is approaching five years , unless you have a family member or friend who can serve as your donor. During this time, your activity will be limited due to your fragile condition, and your schedule will be dictated by four-hour dialysis sessions several times a week. Because of this, 77 percent of dialysis patients are unemployed and reliant on social services.

The pain, suffering and death are overwhelming. And so is the cost: roughly 7 percent of the Medicare budget. Dialysis, on its own, costs Medicare more than $87,000 per patient per year. A kidney transplant, on the other hand, pays for itself in less than two years and saves an average of more than $745,000 in medical costs over a 10-year period, with 75 percent of those savings going to the taxpayers. If the supply of transplant kidneys could be increased to meet the demand, taxpayers would save more than $12 billion per year in medical costs.

Solving the organ and kidney waiting list issue is a true win-win: changing the lives of those suffering from kidney failure while relieving a significant burden on the American taxpayer.

Innovations in science and health-care management have undoubtedly increased donations. Last decade, groundbreaking registries and matching programs were created to allow incompatible patient-donor pairs to join a pool of other patients and donors so that each patient received a compatible kidney. The kidney-exchange model has saved thousands of lives and helped earn one of the co-authors of this article a Nobel Prize in economics.

The kidney wait list is now one and a half times the size it was in 2004, when the New England Program for Kidney Exchange began. This is partly because medical progress extending the lives of those on dialysis has failed to address the fundamental issue of organ failure. Meanwhile, innovation in our approach to transplantation has not kept pace with dramatic increases in the demand for kidneys. We are clearly in need of a new approach. Effective legislation can help solve the problem.

The Organ Donation Clarification Act, introduced by the other co-author of this article, proposes a new and innovative path toward increasing both deceased and living organ donation. The bill clarifies the definition of a “valuable consideration” — cash payments for donation, which are currently prohibited for organ donors — to eliminate misunderstandings and delays in reimbursement for valid donation-related expenses, which have hampered living organ donation. This bill also allows government-run, ethics-board-approved pilot programs to test the effectiveness of providing noncash incentives to promote organ donation.

What might such pilot programs look like? Perhaps a living donor might receive health insurance, forgiveness of student loans, a donation to a charity of choice, a contribution to retirement savings. The family of a deceased donor might get funeral benefits.

We do not know exactly what the effects of incentives would be on organ donation, which is exactly why these pilot programs are necessary. Would they help? What incentives would be most effective? What are the unforeseen circumstances? Let’s allow the scientific community to experiment, test creative solutions and see what might solve this crisis.

Public opinion firmly supports compensating organ donors. The pilot programs under the bill would ensure the noncash incentives would not come from the organ recipient and that organs would be distributed fairly, in the same manner they are now. With those parameters, more than 80 percent of people in a recent national academic study of nearly 3,000 voiced their support for a successful program of compensating organ donors.

There are many factors to consider when tackling the issue of organ donation. We must preserve dignity, avoid exploitation and be careful about incentives. We must ensure that the poor and desperate are not treated unfairly.

We can do this right, and these pilot programs will help us get answers to fix the organ shortage that costs us 20 American lives every day. We can save lives, end suffering and save billions in the process. The time to act is now."
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The bill is is designed to make healthcare more accessable. And it is pro-science as a way for finding out how to do this.  It is likely that it will meet with some opposition ... but it's good to know that we have representatives like Mr. Cartwright who keep trying.

Computational advances for hard matching problems

Computational complexity theory focuses on worst case examples to identify hard problems, but the good news is that the instances that arise in practice of the (potentially) hard problems identified in this way can often be solved pretty efficiently. Here are some new techniques for doing that, from Scottish researchers:

Mathematical models for stable matching problems with ties and incomplete lists
by Maxence Delorme, Sergio Garcia, Jacek Gondzio, Joerg Kalcsics, David Manlove, and William Pettersson

Abstract: We present new integer linear programming (ILP) models for N P-hard optimisation problems in instances of the Stable Marriage problem with Ties and Incomplete lists (SMTI) and its many-to-one generalisation, the Hospitals / Residents problem with Ties (HRT). These models can be used to efficiently solve these optimisation problems when applied to (i) instances derived from real-world applications, and (ii) larger instances that are randomly generated. In the case of SMTI, we consider instances arising from the pairing of children with adoptive families, where preferences are obtained from a quality measure of each possible pairing of child to family. In this case we seek a maximum weight stable matching. We present new algorithms for preprocessing instances of SMTI with ties on both sides, as well as new ILP models. Algorithms based on existing state-of-the-art models only solve 6 of our 22 real-world instances within an hour per instance, and our new models solve all 22 instances within a mean runtime of 60 seconds. For HRT, we consider instances derived from the problem of assigning junior doctors to foundation posts in Scottish hospitals. Here we seek a maximum size stable matching. We show how to extend our models for SMTI to the HRT case. For the real instances, we reduce the mean runtime from an average of 144 seconds when using state-of-the-art methods, to 3 seconds when using our new ILP based algorithms. We also show that our models outperform considerably state-of-the-art models on larger randomly-generated instances of SMTI and HRT