Portrait. Luis Pérez Oramas

Portrait

Born in 1944, I grew up in a world in which polio was both a gripping fear and real threat. Then in a matter of a few years-polio was eradicated by a vaccine developed by Jonas Salk. Later I learned that Salk's efforts were built on pioneering work of many others, including John Enders, Thomas Weller and Frederick Robbins (Nobelists, 1954), and David Bodian, who pioneered studies of polio patho...

LUIS SALDANHA and

We distinguish two conceptions of sample and sampling that emerged in the context of a teaching experiment conducted in a high school statistics class. In one conception 'sample as a quasi-proportional, small-scale version of the population' is the encompassing image. This conception entails images of repeating the sampling process and an image of variability among its outcomes that supports re...

Google Portrait

Luis García Ballester

The death of Luis Garcia Ballester while still at the height of his powers is a great loss to the world of medical history, not only in Spain. Born in Valencia into a Catalan family, he trained as a doctor, taking his MD in 1966 at Valencia. But already he was turning to a career in medical history, under the influence of J M Lopez Pifiero, with whom he collaborated from 1961 to 1971 during the...

Luis Garicano REFERRALS*

This paper studies the matching of opportunities with talent when costly diagnosis confers an informational advantage to the agent undertaking it. When this agent is under-qualified, adverse selection prevents efficient referrals through fixed-price contracts. Spot-market contracts that rely on income sharing can match opportunities with talent but induce a team-production problem which, if sev...