Showing posts with label France. Show all posts
Showing posts with label France. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 6, 2024

France amends its constitution to protect access to abortion

 The decision of the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe v.Wade and end a constitutional right to abortion in the U.S. prompted France to amend its constitution to guarantee access to abortion.

Here's the WSJ story:

France becomes first country to explicitly enshrine abortion rights in constitution  By Karla Adam

"With the endorsement of a specially convened session of lawmakers at the Palace of Versailles, France on Monday became the first country in the world to explicitly enshrine abortion rights in its constitution — an effort galvanized by the rollback of protections in the United States.

"The amendment referring to abortion as a “guaranteed freedom” passed by a vote of 780 in favor and 72 against, far above the required threshold of support from three-fifths of lawmakers, or 512 votes.

"French President Emmanuel Macron announced that a “sealing ceremony,” a tradition reserved for the most significant laws, would take place Friday, coinciding with International Women’s Day.

“We’re sending a message to all women: Your body belongs to you, and no one can decide for you,” Prime Minister Gabriel Attal told lawmakers assembled in Versailles."*

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Le Monde has the story, in an editorial supporting the amendment:

Enshrining abortion access in the French Constitution is a win for feminism and democracy, EDITORIAL, Le Monde, March 4

"The joint session of both houses of Parliament convened in Versailles on Monday, March 4, to enshrine access to abortion in the French Constitution, marks an important moment in the life of the nation. And a proud moment, too. A few days before International Women's Rights Day on March 8, women's freedom to control their own bodies should be anchored in French law. It also comes at a time when abortion, once thought to be a widely accepted procedure, is being undermined in a number of democracies, most notably the United States.

...

"The three-fifths majority required in Parliament means that a consensus has been reached, despite the fact that abortion still disgusts some on the right and far right. It's a sign that democracy works, despite the distress signals it is sending out.

"At every stage of the lengthy procedure initiated in November 2022, the drafting of the Constitutional reform constantly required perseverance and tact. First in the Assemblée Nationale, where, in response to the shockwave caused in June 2022 by the US Supreme Court's decision to revoke the federal right to abortion, the radical-left La France Insoumise party and the center-right presidential majority agreed to work together on a common cause.

"Then the fight continued in the Sénat, where, in loyalty to Simone Veil's 1975 battle to decriminalize abortion, a number of right-wing Les Républicains elected representatives fought hard to ensure that the debate, which they had reframed, could continue against the advice of their group's president, Bruno Retailleau, and Sénat President Gérard Larcher. Finally, in the government, Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti facilitated the drafting and adoption of the final text. The compromise consists of enshrining the notion of "guaranteed freedom" for women to have access to abortion, without introducing an enforceable "right" to abortion as demanded by the left."

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*Regarding the Prime Minister's remark to women that "no one can decide for you" I note that surrogacy remains illegal in France.

Friday, October 18, 2019

Thursday, August 3, 2023

Market design conferences: Marseille, 11 – 15 December, and Santiago 18-20 December, 2023

 Here's the conference announcement from Marseille: 

From matchings to markets. A tale of Mathematics, Economics and Computer Science. Des matchings aux marchés. Une histoire de mathématiques. 11 – 15 December 2023, at the CIRM center in Marseille, France.

"This conference aims at gathering researchers from the fields of mathematics, computer science and economics (broadly defined) sharing common interests in the study of matching problems and the design of their markets. The presentations can cover a wide variety of topics and methods: specific matching markets, general models, theory, empirical analysis. . . etc"

Scientific Committee 
Comité scientifique 

Nick Arnosti (University of Minnesota)
Michal Feldman (Tel Aviv University)
Alfred Galichon (Science Po & New York University)
Michael Jordan (University of Stanford)
Claire Mathieu (CNRS – Collège France)

Organizing Committee
Comité d’organisation

Nick Arnosti (University of Minnesota)
Julien Combe (CREST & École Polytechnique)
Claire Mathieu (CNRS – Paris)
Vianney Perchet (ENSAE & Criteo AI lab)

*******
And here's the announcement of the conference in Santiago:

Keynote Speakers
Omar Besbes
Columbia University
Nicole Immorlica
Microsoft Research New England
Alvin Roth
Stanford University
Participants



Itai Ashlagi
Stanford University

Martin Castillo
New York University

Francisco Castro
University of California

José Correa
Universidad de Chile

Sofía Correa
Universidad de Chile

Andrés Cristi
Universidad de Chile

Juan Escobar
Universidad de Chile

Maximilien Ficht
Universidad de Chile

Yannai Gonczarowski
Harvard University

Nima Haghpanah
Pennsylvania State University

Jason Hartline
Northwestern University

Tibor Heumann
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Rahmi Ilkilic
Universidad de Chile

Revi Jagadeesan
Stanford University

Max Klimm
Technische Universität Berlin

Tomás Larroucau
Arizona State University

Mariana Laverde
Boston College

Ilan Lobel
New York University

Alfonso Montes
Universidad de Chile

Marcelo Olivares
Universidad de Chile

Renato Paes Leme
Google Research New York

Juan Sebastián Pereyra
Universidad de Montevideo

Adriana Piazza
Universidad de Chile

Dana Pizarro
Universidad de O'Higgins

Marco Scarsini
Universidad Luiss Guido Carli

Vasiliki Skreta
University of Texas at Austin

Laura Vargas-Koch
ETH Zurich

Víctor Verdugo
Universidad de O'Higgins

Matt Weinberg
Princeton University

Gabriel Weintraub
Stanford University

Asaf Zeevi
Columbia University

Thursday, June 15, 2023

School choice and related matching algorithms in France, by Vincent Iehlé and Julien Jacqmin

Here's a recent paper that looks at the assignment of students to some of France's Grandes Ecoles, and draws some conclusions about the preferences for those schools.

SIGEM : analyse de la procédure d’affectation dans les grandes écoles de management,, Vincent Iehlé, Julien Jacqmin, Dans Revue économique 2023/2 (Vol. 74), pages 139 à 168 (SIGEM: analysis of the assignment procedure in major management schools)

"First, we list the expected properties of the assignments produced by the SIGEM. To do this we identify the SIGEM algorithm. It is quite standard in this type of environment since it is the “schools” version of the algorithm of Gale and Shapley [1962]. Based on this information, we show that assignments satisfy a stability property that is crucial in educational systems since it guarantees fair treatment of declared wishes and rankings. On the other hand, the use of this version of the algorithm of Gale and Shapley [1962], in opposition to the "candidate" version, raises two reservations concerning, on the one hand, the sub-optimality of the assignments from the point of view candidates and, on the other, the theoretical absence of simple strategies for candidates to play when submitting their wishes. This theoretical analysis of the algorithm is completed by a discussion on the specificities of the SIGEM procedure which can explain the formation of strategic behaviors. The second contribution concerns the use made of the results of this procedure in the case of SIGEM. We show how post-assignment data is used to determine the influential ranking of SIGEM from the so-called cross-dismissal matrix, itself based on the candidates' revealed preferences and their final assignments. The last contribution concerns the exploitation of a stylized fact which justifies the joint analysis of the algorithm and the SIGEM classification. The post-assignment data indeed reveal the existence of a hierarchy of schools that is very rigid and that achieves a consensus among students. This point is particularly interesting because it finally allows to have a finer look at the theoretical properties of the algorithm, the alignment of the preferences of the candidates tending to limit the impact of the negative effects associated with the use of the version "schools" of the algorithm of Gale and Shapley [1962]."

...

"Figure 2 presents for each school the number of ranked candidates and the number of wishes expressed for the school among these ranked. It seems to confirm the existence of these voluntary self-censorship strategies. In particular, we observe a significant loss for schools of average attractiveness (for example, AUDENCIA, NEOMA, SKEMA) which are more likely to be subject to both downward and upward truncation on the part of candidates ."



********

Recall also, 

Strategic Issues in the French Academic Job Market, by Guillaume Haeringer, Vincent Iehlé In Revue économique Volume 61, Issue 4, 2010, pages 697 to 721

Wednesday, August 24, 2022

Learning and competition in the lab, in France, and in India

 Three NBER working papers this week particularly caught my eye: a lab experiment, a natural experiment, and a field experiment.

The first is a reminder of why simple reinforcement learning models have as much predictive power as they do. It's an experiment that shows that even when others' experience is made clearly visible, there's a tendency to rely on 'own experience'.

Not Learning from Others by John J. Conlon, Malavika Mani, Gautam Rao, Matthew W. Ridley & Frank Schilbach  WORKING PAPER 30378 DOI 10.3386/w30378 August 2022

Abstract: We provide evidence of a powerful barrier to social learning: people are much less sensitive to information others discover compared to equally-relevant information they discover themselves. In a series of incentivized lab experiments, we ask participants to guess the color composition of balls in an urn after drawing balls with replacement. Participants' guesses are substantially less sensitive to draws made by another player compared to draws made themselves. This result holds when others' signals must be learned through discussion, when they are perfectly communicated by the experimenter, and even when participants see their teammate drawing balls from the urn with their own eyes. We find a crucial role for taking some action to generate one's `own' information, and rule out distrust, confusion, errors in probabilistic thinking, up-front inattention and imperfect recall as channels.

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The second is a careful study of affirmative action for women in French chess tournaments: a requirement that teams include a woman had many effects, including improvement in the quality of play by French women.

Trickle-Down Effects of Affirmative Action: A Case Study in France by José De Sousa & Muriel Niederle, WORKING PAPER 30367 DOI 10.3386/w30367 August 2022

Abstract: "The introduction of a quota in the French chess Club Championship in 1990, an activity many players engage in next to playing in individual tournaments, provides a quite unique environment to study its effects on three levels. We find that women selected by the quota improve their performance. We show large spillover and trickle-down effects: There are more and better qualified women. International comparisons confirm that the results are unique to France and that there are no substantial adverse effects on French male players. We discuss the properties of this quota and how to implement it in other environments."

The concluding paragraph:

"We speculate that one reason for the success of the French chess quota was due to the fact that it was an “output” rather than a “pure representation” quota. At least one ninth of the performance of teams in the Club Championship was determined by the performance of female players. Such an “output” based quota provides organization with different incentives than a pure representation quota does. We use economic departments to discuss the different gender quotas and how each of them might be implemented. We hope that future work will provide theoretical properties of various quotas as well as find other areas where output quotas are already, or could be, implemented."

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The third is about the difficulty of inducing competition in close quarters.

Does the Invisible Hand Efficiently Guide Entry and Exit? Evidence from a Vegetable Market Experiment in India by Abhijit Banerjee, Greg Fischer, Dean Karlan, Matt Lowe & Benjamin N. Roth, WORKING PAPER 30360 DOI 10.3386/w30360, August 2022

Abstract: "What accounts for the ubiquity of small vendors operating side-by-side in the urban centers of developing countries? Why don’t competitive forces drive some vendors out of the market? We ran an experiment in Kolkata vegetable markets in which we induced (via subsidizing) some vendors to sell additional produce. The vendors earned higher profits, even when excluding the value of the subsidy. Nevertheless, after the subsidies ended vendors largely stopped selling the additional produce. Our results are consistent with collusion and inertial business practices suppressing competition and efficient market exit."


Saturday, July 9, 2022

Prospects for improving kidney exchange in France

A recent article in Néphrologie & Thérapeutique simulates how kidney exchange in France could possibly be made substantially more effective, following liberalizations in the law. (The article is in French, but also has an English abstract.) A promising feature is that the article is a collaboration between physicians and market design economists.

Perspectives pour une évolution du programme de don croisé de reins en France

Perspectives for future development of the kidney paired donation programme in France by Julien Combe, Victor Hiller, Olivier Tercieux,  Benoît Audry, Jules Baudet, Géraldine   Malaquin, François Kerbaul, Corinne Antoine, Marie-Alice Macher, Christian Jacquelinet, Olivier Bastien, and Myriam Pastural

Abstract: "Almost one third of kidney donation candidates are incompatible (HLA and/or ABO) with their directed recipient. Kidney paired donation allows potential donors to be exchanged and gives access to a compatible kidney transplant. The Bioethics Law of 2011 authorised kidney paired donation in France with reciprocity between 2 incompatible “donor-recipient” pairs. A limited number of transplants have been performed due to a too restricted authorization compared to other European practices. This study presents the perspectives of the new Bioethics Law, enacted in 2021, which increases the authorised practices for kidney paired donation in France. The two simulated evolutions are the increase of the number of pairs involved in a kidney paired donation to 6 (against 2 currently) and the use of a deceased donor as a substitution to one of living donor. Different scenarios are simulated using data from the Agence de la Biomedecine; incompatible pairs registered in the kidney paired donation programme in France between December 2013 and February 2018 (78 incompatible pairs), incompatible transplants performed during the same period (476 incompatible pairs) and characteristics of deceased donors as well as proposals made over this period. Increasing the number of pairs has a limited effect on the number of transplants, which increases from 18 (23% of recipients) in the current system to 25 (32% of recipients) when 6 pairs can be involved. The use of a deceased donor significantly increases the number of transplants to 41 (52% of recipients). This study makes it possible to evaluate the increase in possibilities of kidney transplants by kidney paired donation following the new bioethics law. A working group and an information campaign for professionals and patients will be necessary for its implementation."

While the paper focuses on the situation in France, it's opening lines could have been written anywhere:

"La France, comme l’ensemble des pays du monde, souffre d’une pénurie de greffons rénaux de sorte que le nombre de malades en attente d’une greffe de rein ne cesse de croître." [France, like all countries in the world, suffers from a shortage of kidney transplants so that the number of patients waiting for a kidney transplant continues to grow."

Here's hoping that the authors will succeed in their plans to use deceased-donor initiated chains to save more lives in France.

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Earlier related posts:

Sunday, April 3, 2022

Monday, November 22, 2021

Tuesday, August 7, 2018

 

Thursday, August 26, 2021

The Limits of the Markets - Commodification of Nature and Body, reviewed in OEconomia

 The journal OEconomia has a review of the book 

Élodie Bertrand, Marie-Xavière Catto and Alicia-Dorothy Mornington (eds), Les limites du marché - La marchandisation de la nature et du corps / The Limits of the Markets - Commodification of Nature and Body, Paris: Mare & Martin, 2020, 320 pages

(From the publisher's page:

"How to limit the market, when its progressive ex tension is now gaining fields which until recently escaped it, such as the body and nature? This question is at the heart of Commodification Studies, studies that focus on the ethical, moral or social problems posed by certain particular markets (surrogacy, organs, environmental services, etc.). Can we escape certain forms of commodification when technical advances have allowed new “objects” to circulate?")


Here is the (16 page) review in OEconomia:

Christian Bessy, “Addressing Moral Concerns Raised by the Market”, Œconomia [Online], 11-2 | 2021, oeconomia/10975 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/oeconomia.10975

It opens as follows:

"This collective work, which brings together some fifteen contributions, is the result of study days whose main purpose was to debate the commodification of the body and of nature, by crossing disciplinary (philosophy, law, economics) and cultural (Anglo-Saxon and continental) perspectives. Its main interest is to propose a sort of progress report on what is known as commodification studies, which developed in the English-speaking world in the 1980s, largely inspired by the book Contested Commodities by the jurist Margaret Jane Radin (1996). In particular, this stream of research was a reaction to the Law and Economics approach (the Chicago School), which championed the free market. An emblematic example is the article by Elizabeth Landes and Richard Posner (1978), in which they suggested introducing market incentives into the process of adopting new-born babies in order to deal with a baby shortage. The controversies surrounding the emergence of particular markets help to explain the issues involved in regulating these markets and the sometimes alternative solutions that are finally adopted but which may evolve, particularly as a result of globalization.

"Other economists have contributed to this reflection, such as Alvin Roth (2007) with his characterization of so-called “repugnant” or “toxic” markets.

"In France, the commodification studies movement has been developed by lawyers specializing in the law of nature (notably MarieAngèle Hermitte, 2016) and by sociologists who have introduced the notion of “contested markets”, in the sense of markets that provoke strong moral controversies. The book Marchés contestés - Quand le marché rencontre la morale (Contested Markets: When the Market Meets Morality), edited by Philippe Steiner and Marie Trespeuch (2014), is a reference, following on from Viviana Zelizer’s original research (1979) on the development of life insurance. The commodification studies movement must also be linked to philosophical reflections on what is a “good”, reflections explored in depth here by Emmanuel Picavet, with a contribution in which he raises the question of freedom and justice.

"It is precisely the intention of The Limits of the Market to start from the most debateable transactions in order to address more generally the relationship between ethics and economics. In so doing, the book deals with the place of law in these exchanges, or with the different conceptions of the legal human person underlying them."



Monday, May 31, 2021

Covid vaccine congestion in France looks familiar

France is some weeks behind the U.S. in delivering vaccines, but the script will look familiar to Americans.

The  Financial Times has the story:

France finally gets its Covid vaccination act together. The country’s inoculation drive has picked up speed after a slow start. by David Keohane 

"All it took to get my first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine in France was a five-hour round trip and two days and eight hours of incessant refreshing at my computer. 

...

""Until May 12, younger people in France weren’t allowed to book a vaccination unless they suffered from an underlying health condition which pushed them up the queue. 

"Since then anyone can book as long as the dose is set to go begging in the following 24 hours."


Monday, November 30, 2020

Philippe Steiner on matching and romance, and transplants

 The French economic sociologist Philippe Steiner, who studies (among other things) how markets and gift giving can coexist, has a short piece about dating platforms.

Plateformes d’appariement, rencontres amoureuses et mondes marchands ("Matching platforms, romantic encounters and trading worlds") by Philippe Steiner, Dans Revue Française de Socio-Économie 2020/2 (n° 25), pages 161 à 166

Via google translate:

"Two elements can serve to close this brief reflection on the meeting of economic sociology and the sociology of sexuality.

"The appearance of a commercial intermediary modifies the social conditions of the romantic encounter. However, is it of a commercial nature? The use of the term matrimonial market, in which it is a question of "making a choice, maximizing your options and using calculation techniques in terms of costs and profits, and efficiency" [Illouz, 2006, p. 252], might lead one to believe. This interpretation is doubtful: if the market implies the idea of ​​choice, the converse is not true. The market relationship is characterized by monetary power, that is, the ability to obtain the desired good by paying more - it is not for nothing that auction technology is often taken as the example of the market. Also, once the relationship connecting individuals to the platform has brought together two potential partners, it is not the ability to pay that will make the match between them."

...

"Finally, the matching technologies that are at work in the platforms are not necessarily associated with the market world [Steiner, 2016, chap. 7]. Matching platforms using deferred acceptance or optimal trading cycle technologies can serve as well to reproduce the market functioning as to enable non-market matches. Alvin Roth's economic engineering applies to the labor market (pairing of medical interns and hospitals) as well as to organ transplantation, in which the commercial relationship is banned by national laws as well as by international declarations of professionals."

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The following interview may also be of interest to readers of this blog:

“Organic” Gift-Giving and Organ Transplantation, the Development of Economic Sociology and Morality in a Super-Monetized World: An Interview with Philippe Steiner Journal of Economic Sociology, 2014, vol. 15, issue 1, 11-19

 "when I studied the issue of organ transplantation, in full agreement with Healy’s approach, the organizational setting appeared to be very, very important. Accordingly, organ donation is a gift that individual actors provide to organizational actors. And then, with this gift, the organization conducts an extensive and very important process to ensure that the kidney does not convey illness, AIDS, cancer. In addition, the degree of compatibility between the organ and the body is checked. And they do this very rapidly. Then, they allocate the gift to a new individual actor. However, the important thing, in my opinion, is that between the first individual actor and the second one there is a large organization. More precisely, a plurality of organizations. This is something that I refer to in my present book as  organizational gift-giving”. To parallel the Durkheimian distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity, I would call this “organic” gift-giving and thus draw a distinction between the usual story about people in Melanesia who give gifts according to Malinowski and Mauss. 

...

" I am trying to map gift-giving, inheritance, and the exchange of symbolic goods, which are at the frontiers of usual market exchanges, to provide a broad view of what exchange at large means in our present society. Considering market exchange as a limited element of all the transactions in the world is my way to escape this super-monetized world.

...

"Social forces are pushing in the direction of a fullblown market society, whereas others are resisting and devoting their energy to maintaining a frontier between market exchanges and other forms of exchange. In that sense, political issues remain central, as in Polanyi’s time. To return to my research on organ transplantation, I would like to stress that the last chapter of the book concerns what is usually referred to as transplant tourism — is it good to have transplant tourism? Should it be fully legalized? Is the creation of a biomarket in India for Americans suffering from final-stage kidney failure a good thing? You must say yes or no. You cannot escape a political decision. And my answer was “Definitely, no biomarkets”. However, of course, this is not an easy position because as you know there are individuals who are dying because of the lack of kidneys. Therefore, this (response) is uncertain, difficult. However, in the end, not giving an answer is a boon to those pushing for the commodification of body parts. So, finally, I decided to stay on the Maussian–Polanyian side — “limit the market.”

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 transplantation during the COVID-19 pandemic
Alexandre Loupy, Olivier Aubert, Peter P Reese, Olivier Bastien, Florian Bayer, Christian Jacquelinet
Published:May 11, 2020

Here is a set of figures showing "Trends in COVID-19 spread over time in France and the USA and recovery of organs and solid-organ transplantation procedures from deceased donors" (The top two figures are France, the bottom two US)


Here's an updated snapshot of American transplants from UNOS, for all organs:


and for kidneys:

Saturday, April 11, 2020

Market design seminars on Zoom, Monday afternoons in Paris

For those of you missing your local market design seminars, here's a convenient substitute, Monday afternoons if you're in Europe, or before breakfast if you're in California... (The first one was this past Thursday.)

Virtual MD Seminar Series
The Virtual Market Design Seminar is an open online alternative to seminars cancelled due to the COVID-19. Seminars will cover all fields from market design. Talks usually take place bi-weekly on Monday at 4:00-5:00pm (Paris UTC) on Zoom. Please check the schedule below, different days and times are possible.
Registration
If you would like to participate and to stay up to date about upcoming presentations, please join our mailing list. You will receive the Zoom link for each talk. 

Upcoming Presentations
Thursday, April 9, 2:00pm (Paris UTC).
Maarten Janssen (University of Vienna): "Regulating Product Communication". (with S. Roy). [slides]
Monday, April 20, 4:00pm (Paris UTC).
Scott Duke Kominers (Harvard Business School): "Redistribution through Markets" (with P. Dworczak and M. Akbarpour).
Monday, May 4, 4:00pm (Paris UTC).
Renato Gomes (Toulouse School of Economics): "Regulating Platform Fees under Price Parity" (with A. Mantovani).
Monday, May 18, 4:00pm (Paris UTC).
Benny Moldovanu (University of Bonn):"tba".

Organizers
Olivier Bos (Paris II), Nicolas Fugger (Cologne), Vitali Gretschko (ZEW), Helene Mass (Bonn), Marion Ott (ZEW), Martin Pollrich (Bonn), Nora Szech (KIT).

Sunday, February 16, 2020

Marketplace Design: summer school at Paris School of Economics in June

Olivier Tercieux forwarded this announcement:

THE DESIGN OF MARKET PLACES - Recent development in matching theory and empirical methods of matching  June 22 to June 26, 2020

"Allocation procedures have recently become a new and exciting field of economic research, with a wide range of applications. Since the seminal work by Gale and Shapley (1962) and Shapley and Shubik (1971), matching theory has developed and matured to a point where matching theorists could guide designs of medical match and other entry-level labor markets, school choice, course allocation and organ donation, among others. This course will introduce you to the frontier of research, including theoretical developments, applications, and empirical analysis"

The professors are:
•       Olivier Tercieux, Two-sided matching theory and application to school choice
•       Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Empirics of school choice
•       Alfred Galichon, Matching theory with transfers: optimal transport and economic applications

Friday, December 6, 2019

Testing your own DNA is illegal in France

Statnews.com has the story:

In France, it’s illegal for consumers to order a DNA spit kit. Activists are fighting over lifting the ban  By ERIC BOODMAN

"The French ban on direct-to-consumer genetic testing is part of the country’s bioethics laws, which legislators are supposed to revise every seven years. When those discussions got underway earlier this year, some geneticists expected the National Assembly to relax the rules about commercial DNA analysis. It didn’t. Now, Jovanovic-Floricourt and the other genetics enthusiasts in her education and advocacy group, DNA Pass, are agitating more and more to get some of these tests legalized, contacting lawmakers, chatting up scientists, promising a more vociferous campaign than they’ve waged before.

"But as one of the most vocal pro-legalization advocates, Jovanovic-Floricourt may have found her match in geneticist Guillaume Vogt and his bioethicist postdoc Henri-Corto Stoeklé. Theirs is an unusual standoff, in that they’re all motivated by the same ideas. Both sides hope to protect French genomes from exploitation by foreign companies. Both sides believe that French institutions are the best guardians for the job. They just disagree about how, exactly, to realize that vision. As Vogt, a scientist at the National Center for Human Genomics Research, put it, “Don’t change the law!”

Friday, October 18, 2019

Will IVF become more widely legal in France?

The Washington Post has the story:

Why an IVF bill is the next fault line for the French republic  By Camille Robcis

"Since 1994, France has banned surrogacy and restricted access to reproductive technologies to heterosexual couples who have been married or living together for more than two years, forcing single women and lesbian couples to travel to neighboring countries for fertility treatments, and gay men to resort to surrogates in countries such as the United States or the United Kingdom. On Tuesday, the French National Assembly is scheduled to vote on a bill that would finally allow access to assisted reproductive technologies, including IVF, for unmarried women and lesbian couples. Under the proposed law, the treatments would be reimbursed by Social Security, and French doctors helping these women with fertility treatments would no longer face legal sanctions. Surrogacy, however, would remain illegal.
...
"After a month of fierce legislative debates that have resulted in more than 2,000 proposed amendments to the bill, an estimated 75,000 marchers took to the streets of Paris on Oct. 6 in opposition. "

Friday, September 6, 2019

New York City considers bill to ban foie gras


Bill aims to ban sale of foie gras in New York restaurants over 'cruel' process
If bill passes, anyone violating the law could be liable to a $1,000 fine, up to a year in jail or both

"New York City council is considering outlawing the product – which derives from duck or goose and translates as “fatty liver” – which is a staple at many of its top restaurants.

"Critics of foie gras say the process is cruel because ducks and geese are overfed through a pipe which can expand the liver up to 10 times its normal size.

The proposed bill, which could be voted on in months, would ban the sale of foie gras made from birds that have " force fed and establishments from serving it.
...
"If New York introduces a ban it will put the city alongside California, which has a state-wide ban on the production and sale of foie gras. Chicago passed a ban in 2006, but it was overturned two years later.

"Whole Foods banned its sale in 1997 and Postmates ended deliveries of it last year.

"Outside the US, Britain, Israel and India all have bans on sale or production."
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For a different view, French law (Code rural) states
"Article L654-27-1
Créé par Loi n°2006-11 du 5 janvier 2006 - art. 74 JORF 6 janvier 2006
Le foie gras fait partie du patrimoine culturel et gastronomique protégé en France. On entend par foie gras, le foie d'un canard ou d'une oie spécialement engraissé par gavage."

Google translate: "Foie gras is part of the cultural and gastronomic heritage protected in France. By foie gras, the liver of a duck or a goose specially fattened by gavage."

Saturday, August 31, 2019

Predicting stable matches from the preferences of one side of the market: Haeringer and Iehlé in AEJ-Micro

Two-Sided Matching with (Almost) One-Sided Preferences
By Guillaume Haeringer and Vincent Iehlé
American Economic Journal: Microeconomics 2019, 11(3): 155–190.


Abstract: "In a two-sided matching context we show how we can predict  stable matchings  by  considering  only  one  side’s  preferences  and  the  mutually  acceptable  pairs  of  agents.  Our  methodology  consists  of  identifying  impossible  matches,  i.e.,  pairs  of  agents  that  can  never  be matched together in a stable matching of any problem consistent with  the  partial  data.  We  analyze  data  from  the  French  academic  job  market  for  mathematicians  and  show  that  the  match  of  about  45 percent of positions (and about 60 percent of candidates) does not depend on the preferences of the hired candidates, unobserved and submitted at the final stage of the market."


Haeringer and Iehlé present new theory and explore an interesting data set, described as follows:

"Market for Mathematicians
In 1998, a small group of young mathematicians set up a website, Opération Postes,  inviting  recruiting  committees  to  announce  the  lists  of  candidates  to  be  interviewed  as  well  as  the  rankings  of  candidates  that  will  be  submitted  to  the  clearinghouse (the ministry), as soon as these would be decided.19 The community of mathematicians was very responsive and the website quickly became a central tool  in  the  job  market.20  The  data  for  each  position  (interviewees  list  and  rank-ings) is usually uploaded by the the chairs of the recruiting committees themselves (and  if  not,  by  a  member  of  the  committee).  On  average,  about  90–95 percent  of  the  job  openings’  interview  lists  and  rankings  are  available.21  The  data  of  Opération  Postes  is  public,  although  not  in  a  format  that  makes  it  immediately  usable  for  any  analysis.  There  are  many  misspellings,  and  we  sometimes  found  confusions  between  the  married  and  maiden  names  of  some  female  candidates.  By  cross-referencing the data with other sources we were able to compose a clean dataset.22We  also  collected  for  each  year  the  assignment  of  candidates  to  departments.  This  assignment  is  computed  by  the  Ministry  of  Higher  Education  by  using  candidate’s  submitted  preference  lists  over  the  departments  and  the  rankings  of  candidates established by the recruiting committees."