Bride Price and Female Education by Ashraf, Bau, Nunn and Voena

A new NBER working paper suggests that the institution of bride price, often regarded as a repugnant transaction, may provide incentives to educate girls, which increases their price.

Bride Price and Female Education

Nava Ashraf, Natalie Bau, Nathan Nunn, Alessandra Voena

NBER Working Paper No. 22417
Issued in July 2016

Traditional cultural practices can play an important role in development, but can also inspire condemnation. The custom of bride price, prevalent throughout sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia as a payment by the groom to the family of the bride, is one example. In this paper, we show a perhaps surprising economic consequence of this practice. We revisit one of the best-studied historical development projects, the INPRES school construction program in Indonesia, and show that previously found small effects on female enrollment mask heterogeneity by bride price tradition. Ethnic groups that traditionally engage in bride price payments at marriage increased female enrollment in response to the program. Within these ethnic groups, higher female education at marriage is associated with a higher bride price payment received, providing a greater incentive for parents to invest in girls' education and take advantage of the increased supply of schools. However, we see no increase in education following school construction for girls from ethnicities without a bride price tradition. We replicate these findings in Zambia, where we exploit a similar school expansion program that took place in the early 2000s. While there may be significant downsides to a bride price tradition, our results suggest that any change to this cultural custom should likely be considered alongside additional policies to promote female education.

Matching Markets and Market Design: Theory and Application at the NBER on Tuesday July 26

Here's the email from the NBER

"As a reminder, on Tuesday afternoon, July 26, Alvin Roth, Parag Pathak, Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Nikhil Agarwal and Itai Ashlag will be delivering a set of lectures on "Theory and Applications of Market Design" at the NBER Summer Institute.  An outline for the lectures can be found at:

http://conference.nber.org/confer/2016/SI2016/ML/MLprg.html

The lectures will be presented in Ballroom A, West Tower, second floor, at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge, MA beginning at 1:15 pm.  The lectures will also be recorded and posted on the NBER's website.  To assist us with our space planning, we ask that everyone who is planning to attend register by July 22 through the Conference Department's web reply form at https://www.nber.org/ll?u=alvin_roth&p=yTvD&url=/conf/reply/SI16ML  ."

A reading list is here.

Update on compensation for bone marrow donors

Frank McCormick emails about a new movie concerning the 9th Circuit court case which ruled that it might be legal to compensate certain kind of bone marrow/blood stem-cell donors, and the subsequent administrative battle to prevent that: Film inspired by Lewiston mom premieres

"A mission to help her three young daughters — Jordan, Julia and Jorja Flynn — stay healthy despite their Fanconi anemia, a rare genetic blood disorder that destroyed their bone marrow and made them extremely susceptible to cancer.

She's fighting to increase America's pool of bone-marrow donors by getting the federal government to allow some donors to be paid — a significant change she believed would help both donors and those in need, like her daughters.

Four years later, the Lewiston mom is still fighting, both for her daughters' health and against the federal government. But she's getting attention for it in a new way.

Today, a short film inspired by her battles will premiere at the Maine International Film Festival in Waterville.

...
"Hoping to help donors ease the financial burden of donation and give them an incentive to see the process through, Gummoe became lead plaintiff in a lawsuit spearheaded by the Institute for Justice.

For years, federal law has prohibited bone-marrow donors — and organ donors — from being compensated. The suit argued that advances in medicine made bone-marrow donation more like plasma donation, which can be compensated under the law, than to kidney donation, which cannot.

In traditional bone-marrow harvesting, doctors stick a needle through a hip bone and remove bone marrow. The alternative method, peripheral blood stem cell donation, is now used most of the time. In stem cell donation, donors receive injections to increase the production of blood-forming stem cells that are then siphoned out of their blood in a process similar to dialysis.

The lawsuit was successful: The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the new form of bone-marrow donation did not fall under the category of organ donation as the law was written and could be compensated. At least one nonprofit was planning a pilot program to see how compensation — a $3,000 housing allowance, scholarship or charity donation — might boost bone-marrow donation.

But in 2013, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services proposed a new rule that would explicitly include peripheral blood stem cell donation in the definition of organ donation. With that looming for nearly three years, no group has felt comfortable moving forward with a pilot program to compensate donors.

"If they were to raise money and start pursuing this research and then the department issued its rule and blocked it, it would be a waste of their time and resources, which are precious," Kramer said. "In good faith, they couldn't move forward."

The department has until the end of this year to either move forward to prohibit bone-marrow donors from being compensated or drop the issue. A Health and Human Services spokesman said Wednesday that the department was "working toward being responsive to this deadline."

The department has said a ban on compensation would help ensure that, among other things, donors aren't coerced or exploited.

Gummoe and the Institute for Justice believe a ban only ensures that there aren't enough people willing to donate.  "

"Black market" surrogacy in England, and subsequent legal complications

Organizing markets without a strong legal framework can be tricky; here's a British surrogacy story from the law blog Above the Law: I Want To Put A Baby In You: Underground Surrogacy And The Burger King Baby

"Last month, an English court held that a surrogate to an “underground” arrangement could nevertheless keep custody of the baby she carried. This was despite the fact that the surrogate was not genetically related to the child. Instead, she was hired via a “secret” matching service and matched with a gay couple. They hoped to be parents through surrogacy for a second time.

The intended parents and surrogate met only once for 30 minutes. Unfortunately, the meeting was at a Burger King. And now, this poor child is forever linked to the fast-food franchise.

After the meeting, the surrogate was flown to Cyprus. (As I mentioned previously, Cyprus is a hot destination for surrogacy arrangements.) There, she underwent the transfer of two embryos to her uterus. The eggs were from a donor, and one was fertilized by one of the intended parents and the second egg was fertilized with sperm from the other intended parent. The transfer was successful, and the surrogate became pregnant with twins. But sadly, she later miscarried one of the babies.

Issues continued to mount. The intended parents missed payment deadlines. The surrogate learned that the couple’s first surrogate had a negative review of the intended parents. Ultimately, the surrogate decided to keep the remaining child. She lied, and told the intended parents that she had miscarried both babies. But she was caught when the intended parents saw her very pregnant toward the end of the pregnancy.

The intended parents brought legal action against the surrogate to try to obtain their child. But they also had unclean hands. They had offered to “pay” the surrogate 9,000 pounds in exchange for carrying the baby. While British law allows “reimbursement” of expenses to a compassionate surrogate, no “paying” of a surrogate is permitted. Additionally, the court held that the surrogate herself had a learning difficulty that made her consent to the agreement invalid.

Ultimately, the court awarded full custody to the surrogate—I hope that learning difficulty isn’t too severe—while the intended parents get very limited visitation rights:  one weekend every eight weeks.

While it sounds shocking to award a surrogate the parental rights over a child to which they have no genetic connection, this unfortunately happens throughout the world. Even in the United States. And “underground” surrogacy arrangements are not unusual.
...
"the Chinese Ministry of Heath all but outlawed surrogacy in 2001. So the estimated 10,000 surrogacy births in China a year are all via its underground surrogacy industry. And due to the illegality of the arrangement, intended parents in China can lack legitimate parental rights to their children born via surrogacy."
...
"It Happens To U.S. Too. Surrogates change their minds in the United States as well. In the Robinson case, a gay couple in New Jersey asked the sister of one of the men to carry their children for them. Like the China case, this one also involves twin girls. The children were not related to the sister, but the result of an anonymous egg donor and the sperm from the spouse of her brother. After the girls were born, the relationship between the surrogate and the intended parents deteriorated..."

Acquiring the first thousand customers in a two-sided market

HBS Working Knowledge has a nice piece about a case study by Professor Thales Teixeira,

How Uber, Airbnb, and Etsy Attracted Their First 1,000 Customers

On Airbnb:
"founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia thought like customers themselves, trying to figure out where they would go if Airbnb didn’t exist. It didn’t take them long to figure out the answer: Craigslist. The entrepreneurs figured they could do a better job of making apartments appealing than the online classified site, but first they had to siphon away its customers. To do that, Chesky and Gebbia created software to hack Craigslist to extract the contact info of property owners, then sent them a pitch to list on Airbnb as well.

The strategy worked. With nothing to lose, property owners doubled their chances of finding a potential renter, and Airbnb had a ready supply of homes with which it could attract customers."

Repugnant transactions in Saudi

The NY Times has an interesting story on Saudi Arabia: A Saudi Morals Enforcer Called for a More Liberal Islam. Then the Death Threats Began.

Some of the story focuses on repugnant transactions:

"Their embrace of technology runs counter to the history of Wahhabi clerics rejecting nearly everything new as a threat to the religion. Formerly banned items include the telegraph, the radio, the camera, soccer, girls’ education and televisions, whose introduction in the 1960s caused outrage."
...
"The government has sought to control the flow of religious opinions with official fatwa institutions. But state-sanctioned fatwas have provoked laughter, too, like the fatwa calling spending money on Pokemon products “cooperation in sin and transgression.

While the government seeks to get more women into the work force, the state fatwa organization preaches on the “danger of women joining men in the workplace,” which it calls “the reason behind the destruction of societies.”

And there are fatwas that arm extremists with religious justification. There is one fatwa, still available in English on a government website and signed by the previous grand mufti, that states, “Whoever refuses to follow the straight path deserves to be killed or enslaved in order to establish justice, maintain security and peace and safeguard lives, honor and property.”

It goes on: “Slavery in Islam is like a purifying machine or sauna in which those who are captured enter to wash off their dirt and then they come out clean, pure and safe, from another door.”

Scott Kominers celebrated at Chicago--market design and inequality

3 Questions with Scott Kominers, from the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group

Medical tourism: cataract surgery in Britain

Britain is both an origin and a destination for medical tourism--travel to get better or cheaper medical care--and not everyone is happy to be on the receiving end.

The Telegraph has the story: Health tourists jump queue for cataract operations on NHS as British patients wait up to eight months

"Health tourists are being given cataract surgery on the NHS ahead of British patients because their conditions are considered more of a priority, it has emerged.

Hundreds of people from countries including Zimbabwe and Nigeria have been offered the eye operations before UK taxpayers, official figures show.

They have been fast-tracked by medics as their conditions are said to be "very complex and urgent", while some hospitals have waiting times of almost eight months.

Cataract surgery is the most common treatment provided on the NHS and 300,000 operations are carried out each year."
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For some medical tourism that takes British citizens abroad, see e.g. these earlier posts...

What do British fertility tourists choose in America? It's a girl!

Indian surrogates bearing British babies

Assisted suicide in England and Switzerland, continued

Donating a kidney today, and getting a promise of a living donor kidney in the future for someone you specify

Here's a news release from UCLA: ‘Gift certificate’ enables kidney donation when convenient and transplant when needed

"The program allows for living donors to donate a kidney in advance of when a friend or family member might require a kidney transplant.
...
"It is such a simple concept," Veale said. "It's the brainchild of a grandfather who wanted to donate a kidney to his grandson nearing dialysis dependency, but the grandfather felt he would be too old to donate in a few years when his grandson would likely need a transplant."

The release goes on to mention two such advanced donations that have already been made.
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Here's a related announcement: Voucher Allows You To Donate A Kidney Now, Secure One For Later

"Already, 9 other hospitals across the U.S. have joined UCLA and agreed to honor the voucher program. Recently, the Ethics Committee of the American Society of Transplant Surgeons also voted in favor of the voucher program and sent the matter to their executive committee for formal approval.  "


HT: Frank McCormick, Philip Held

Causal Inference and Big Data in PNAS

From PNAS (hard to pronounce, but has some good papers:)

Sackler Colloquium on Drawing Causal Inference from Big Data (Free Online)

Introduction

Drawing causal inference from Big Data 

Richard M. Shiffrin

Colloquium Papers

Causal inference in economics and marketing

Hal R. Varian

Estimating peer effects in networks with peer encouragement designs

Dean Eckles, René F. Kizilcec, and Eytan Bakshy

Quantity discounts on a virtual good: The results of a massive pricing experiment at King Digital Entertainment

Steven D. Levitt, John A. List, Susanne Neckermann, and David Nelson

Characterizing treatment pathways at scale using the OHDSI network

George Hripcsak, Patrick B. Ryan, Jon D. Duke, Nigam H. Shah, Rae Woong Park, Vojtech Huser, Marc A. Suchard, Martijn J. Schuemie, Frank J. DeFalco, Adler Perotte, Juan M. Banda, Christian G. Reich, Lisa M. Schilling, Michael E. Matheny, Daniella Meeker, Nicole Pratt, and David Madigan

Inferring cortical function in the mouse visual system through large-scale systems neuroscience

Michael Hawrylycz, Costas Anastassiou, Anton Arkhipov, Jim Berg, Michael Buice, Nicholas Cain, Nathan W. Gouwens, Sergey Gratiy, Ramakrishnan Iyer, Jung Hoon Lee, Stefan Mihalas, Catalin Mitelut, Shawn Olsen, R. Clay Reid, Corinne Teeter, Saskia de Vries, Jack Waters, Hongkui Zeng, Christof Koch, and MindScope

Causal inference and the data-fusion problem

Elias Bareinboim and Judea Pearl

Recursive partitioning for heterogeneous causal effects

Susan Athey and Guido Imbens

Methods for causal inference from gene perturbation experiments and validation

Nicolai Meinshausen, Alain Hauser, Joris M. Mooij, Jonas Peters, Philip Versteeg, and Peter Bühlmann

Improving massive experiments with threshold blocking

Michael J. Higgins, Fredrik Sävje, and Jasjeet S. Sekhon

Linear mixed model for heritability estimation that explicitly addresses environmental variation

David Heckerman, Deepti Gurdasani, Carl Kadie, Cristina Pomilla, Tommy Carstensen, Hilary Martin, Kenneth Ekoru, Rebecca N. Nsubuga, Gerald Ssenyomo, Anatoli Kamali, Pontiano Kaleebu, Christian Widmer, and Manjinder S. Sandhu

Lasso adjustments of treatment effect estimates in randomized experiments

Adam Bloniarz, Hanzhong Liu, Cun-Hui Zhang, Jasjeet S. Sekhon, and Bin Yu

Modeling confounding by half-sibling regression

Bernhard Schölkopf, David W. Hogg, Dun Wang, Daniel Foreman-Mackey, Dominik Janzing, Carl-Johann Simon-Gabriel, and Jonas Peters

Investing in countries of first refuge, in return for integrating refugees into their economy

The NY Times has a story about Jordan: If a Carrot for Jordan Works, Syrian Refugees Will Stay Put

"Jordan, which has 650,000 Syrian refugees registered with the United Nations inside its borders, has long made it nearly impossible for them to work legally, citing concerns about high unemployment among its citizens. But under the new experiment, the government has given out 13,000 work permits to Syrians, and is promising to issue up to 50,000 by year’s end — and tens of thousands more in the future.

"In exchange, the World Bank is giving Jordan a $300 million interest-free loan, the likes of which are traditionally reserved for extremely poor countries in Africa. Western nations, including the United States, have offered roughly $60 million to build schools to accommodate Syrian children. And Jordan is close to clinching what it wants most: tax-free exports to the European Union, especially garments stitched in its industrial export zones.

"In short, Western leaders are using their financial and political leverage to convince Jordan that it is worthwhile to help refugees improve their lot in this country so they do not cross the Mediterranean Sea in flimsy rafts in search of a better life in Europe. It is a stark shift for both donor countries and Jordan, which, after absorbing generations of refugees from wars across the Middle East, had tried to keep Syrians from establishing a permanent foothold.

“Some may say this is the one shot that the government has to extract a lot of money,” Stefan Dercon, a professor at Oxford University and the chief economist at the British government’s development aid agency, which supports the effort in Jordan. “I would say it is also the only shot that it will have to really reform its economy and create jobs, with substantial international funding.”

"Jordan is not the only country trying to leverage Europe’s anxiety about refugees and migrants. Turkey has negotiated a deal that involves taking back most of those who traveled across the Aegean Sea into Greece in exchange for $6.6 billion in European aid and a proposed waiver of visas for Turks entering Europe.

"Europe is also promising over $4 billion in aid to several African countries in exchange for their help in stemming the exodus out of the continent. Even Sudan, long under European and American sanctions for its human rights record, is reaping money as part of the package. Libya is getting assistance from Europe to keep migrant boats from crossing the Mediterranean, an approach that Human Rights Watch describes as outsourcing “the dirty work to Libyan forces.”
...
"The Jordan deal, announced in February as part of the Jordan Compact, is described optimistically by its framers as “turning the Syrian refugee crisis into a development opportunity.” Its goal is to draw new foreign investment and create jobs for both Jordanians and Syrians. The risk, its proponents privately point out, is that no new investments will pour in, Jordan’s economy will continue to languish and local resentment will grow.

"Until recently, barely 5,000 Syrian refugees had work permits. The International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency that supports and devises work policies, estimated that 50,000 people in Jordan worked off the books — roughly the number that the government is promising to legalize this year alone.

For Jordan’s leaders, grappling with debt and an economy growing at an anemic 2.4 percent, access to the European market is a critical incentive."

The U.S. House of Representatives expresses concerns about organ transplants in China

The House of Representatives has passed a resolution of concern:

H.Res.343 - Expressing concern regarding persistent and credible reports of systematic, state-sanctioned organ harvesting from non-consenting prisoners of conscience in the People's Republic of China, including from large numbers of Falun Gong practitioners and members of other religious and ethnic minority groups.114th Congress (2015-2016) | Get alerts

RESOLUTION

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Sponsor:	Rep. Ros-Lehtinen, Ileana [R-FL-27] (Introduced 06/25/2015)
Committees:	House - Foreign Affairs; Judiciary
Latest Action:	06/13/2016 On motion to suspend the rules and agree to the resolution, as amended Agreed to by voice vote. (text: CR H3728)  (All Actions)

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Summary: H.Res.343 — 114th Congress (2015-2016)All Bill Information (Except Text)

Market design and cultural context: from an interview in Japan

When I was in Japan in April I spoke at Tokyo Institute of Technology. Here's a brief account that just appeared in English, highlighting some remarks I made that markets have cultural contexts: Professor Alvin E. Roth interviewed in Contemporary Society class

"A student asked why Roth engages in fieldwork such as operating room visits to conduct his research. The professor pointed out that markets have too many unwritten rules and are too complex to understand only through books. There are also many culture-related rules that need to be learned through direct experience. If someone designs the Japanese market, that person should be Japanese, someone who truly understands Japanese culture. This comment visibly moved the audience and will undoubtedly motivate students as they pursue their future study and research activities."

Howard Raiffa (1924-2016)

Multiple emails this morning tell that Howard Raiffa passed away peacefully last night. He was an early game theorist, a hero of decision theory, and an institution builder (as well as an institution) at Harvard and elsewhere. (He was also the advisor of my advisor, Bob Wilson.) A gentle man and an intellectual giant.

Here is a picture of Howard and Estelle I took at dinner in Cambridge in 2012. They were high school sweethearts, throughout their long life together.

Estelle and Howard Raiffa in 2012

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Updates:

July 11: here's the email announcement from HBS
"To:  HBS Community
From:  Nitin Nohria
Re:  Sad news -- Howard Raiffa

I am very sorry to let you know that Howard Raiffa died peacefully at his home in Arizona on Friday July 8 following a long battle with Parkinson's.  He was 92 years old.  He is survived by his wife, Estelle, and his two children, Mark and Judy.

Howard, the Frank Plumpton Ramsey Professor of Managerial Economics, came to Harvard Business School in 1957 through the generosity of the Ford Foundation as one of a small cadre of discipline-based scholars.  He was interested in the resolution of conflict through mediation and arbitration, and several times during his career he either invented an entirely new field or changed an existing field so fundamentally that he earned recognition as its reinventor -- from decision analysis to game theory to negotiation analysis.  He authored and co-authored seminal works such as Applied Statistical Decision Theory and Decisions With Multiple Objectives.  An epitome of One Harvard before the phrase was coined, he interests spanned boundaries, and he is credited as a founder of the modern Kennedy School (where he held a joint appointment beginning in 1969) and had close ties as well with the Law School and School of Public Health.  He also served as the founding director of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.

Here at HBS, he was gentle and demanding mentor to many, and a friend and colleague to many more.  While he officially retired from the faculty in 1994 he remained on as an advisor for some time after.

While we do not yet know of plans for a memorial service, we will be sure to communicate any information as it is learned, as well as a full obituary once it is finalized.

Our thoughts and sympathies are with his family and other loved ones."


Here's the Kennedy School obituary: Harvard Kennedy School Remembers Howard Raiffa, July 11, 2016, By Doug Gavel

Here's the IIASA obituary (Howard was IIASA's founding director):  Howard Raiffa 1924-2016

July 12: Here's the INFORMS obituary
Howard Raiffa January 24, 1924 – July 8, 2016

July 13: here's the NYT obit
Howard Raiffa, Mathematician Who Studied Decision Making, Dies at 92
"Howard Raiffa was born in the Bronx on Jan. 24, 1924, the son of Jacob Raiffa, who sold wool products, and the former Hilda Kaplan. He graduated from Evander Childs High School, where he was captain of the basketball team. Math was his best subject, but he dreamed of being a basketball player or coach.

He was attending City College when he enlisted in the Army Air Corps, where he was a radar specialist. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1946, a master’s in statistics and a doctorate in mathematics, all from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

In 1945, he married Estelle Schwartz. She and his daughter survive him, as do a son, Mark, and four grandchildren."

Kidney exchange and school choice in German (two interviews)

In Stern, in German, Bernhard Albrecht talks to  me about Tauschbörse für Organe, "Exchange of Organs."

Offering kidney, seeking kidney
Filesharing are in vogue. Some exchange Sammelbildchen, other clothing. The Nobel laureate economist Alvin Roth has developed a system to swap bodies. Who could benefit?


And today in Berliner Zeitung,  Nobel Prize winner Alvin Roth about the chaos at school choice and organ donation  (Nobelpreisträger Alvin Roth über das Chaos bei Schulwahl und Organspende)

(The latter interview comes without a byline, but I believe the interviewer was by the political correspondent Tobias Peter.)

School choice in Indianapolis

The Indy Star has the story on the changes to come: School choice made easier for Indy parents

"The good news is that change is coming. A new non-profit organization, Enroll Indy, launched by a Mind Trust Education Entrepreneur Fellowship, is working with Indianapolis Public Schools, the Mayor’s Office and the State Charter School Board to streamline the school application process for public school families. Its plan includes a new school information source for parents to learn about their options; a robust effort to work directly with families on navigating the process; a streamlined application that includes both IPS and charter schools; a shared deadline across all schools and a much-needed window of transparency into school enrollment.

For nearly a year, stakeholders in both IPS and the charter sector have worked together on recommendations focused on making enrollment more efficient, equitable and transparent. As such, Enroll Indy is poised to launch a system this fall that will dramatically improve access for all families.

This new system not only will make the enrollment process easier for all families, but it will provide robust data and information to our city as a whole. It will provide new information on the type of schools families want and where they want them, meaning districts and authorizers will be able to collaborate strategically to meet the needs of families, rather than starting schools with no information on the neighborhood’s needs or wants. This data also will enable us to ensure schools are behaving fairly and serving all students, not just those who are easiest to educate."

The global system of refugee protection

I'm at the Center for Migration Studies (CMS*) in New York, attending a conference on the global system of refugee protection, and how it interacts with a myriad of related concerns, among which security has become prominent.

Refugee protection/resettlement is a wicked problem, in all the senses of the word. After the first day of discussion I have to admit its complexity is head-breaking.

Everything having to do with refugee resettlement is complicated by the highly charged political environment in which it is now discussed, and the big consequences this can have. For example, Fiona Adamson of the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies showed some refugee/migrant-inspired posters from the recent Brexit campaign to take Britain out of Europe, like this one.

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*As it happens I began the week at the other CMS, in Baltimore, talking about kidney exchange.

Campaign against research misconduct in the Netherlands

Inside Higher Ed has the story: The Dutch Fight for Research Integrity (and the url is more informative than the headline--https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/06/23/netherlands-starts-major-campaign-against-research-misconduct )

"There are two parts of the Dutch investigation into research integrity: a program called Fostering Responsible Research Practices, which will include a national survey of researchers and research grants into the area, and a fund for replication studies of important “cornerstone” research that has been relied on to make policy or has attracted lots of media attention.
The programs are set to be signed off soon and calls for proposals are expected before the end of the summer.
The mass survey of researchers in the Netherlands will encompass all disciplines, including humanities scholars, who, like scientists, can be “selective” in their use of sources, he said. The anonymized results will be reported back to universities so they can judge the extent of the problem."

Charter schools and school choice

Souls, a journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, has a special issue on New Orleans schools.

Volume 17, Issue 3-4, 2015 

• Taylor & Francis
•  

Souls

A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society

ISSN
1099-9949 (Print), 1548-3843 (Online)

Special Issue: Education in New Orleans: A Decade after Hurricane Katrina

The papers are by and large critical of recent reforms, including school choice.  New Orleans Recovery School District has mostly charter schools.
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And here's a paper just published in the AER that looks at the effects of charter schools, using the fact that some non-charters have been taken over, which changes the selection criteria (students already in a takeover school are grandfathered in...)

American Economic Review 2016, 106(7): 1878–1920

Charters without Lotteries: Testing Takeovers in New Orleans and Boston

Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Joshua D. Angrist, Peter D. Hull and Parag A. Pathak

Charter takeovers are traditional public schools restarted as charter schools. We develop a grandfathering instrument for takeover attendance that compares students at schools designated for takeover with a matched sample of students attending similar schools not yet taken over. Grandfathering estimates from New Orleans show substantial gains from takeover enrollment. In Boston, grandfathered students see achievement gains at least as large as the gains for students assigned charter seats in lotteries. A non-charter Boston turnaround intervention that had much in common with the takeover strategy generated gains as large as those seen for takeovers, while other more modest turnaround interventions yielded smaller effects.

Full-Text Access | Supplementary Materials

Civil servants study market design in Melbourne

The Centre for Market Design in Melbourne is offering a course leading to a Specialist Certificate in Economic Design:

"Sixty international and national government decision makers completed the Specialist Certificate in Economic Design in Canberra last Friday (24 June 2016) with the aim of deepening their economic knowledge.
"The new graduate course, accredited by the University of Melbourne, and developed and taught by the Centre for Market Design (CMD) brings policymakers up-to date with the latest developments in microeconomics.
"It provides public servants with a conceptual framework for analysing policies and evaluating their effect, with emphasis on the resource and information constraints policymakers and market designers face.
...
"Economic design includes the design of procurement mechanisms and sales auctions, double-auctions in two-sided markets, algorithms for matching (e.g. students to schools, or children to kindergarten), and the writing of performance contracts.