Abstracts of Invited and Selected Papers and Organized Symposia, WAEA Annual Meetings, San Francisco, California, July 6-8, 2005

Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

Is information and communication technology (ICT) the right strategy for growth in Mexico?

Although empirical evidence available suggests that information and communication technologies (ICT) have positively contributed to important sectors of the Mexican economy, it is still unknown to which extent ICT have truly contributed to productivity among these sectors. The increasing implementation and imports of ICT technologies, the growing demand for ICT-skilled human capital and training, the rising level of wages and the large demand and adoption of these technologies seem to indicate a positive correlation between ICT implementation and economic growth in Mexico. To answer whether ICT may be a key strategy for economic growth in the Mexican economy is the main purpose of this work. --Information technology,total factor productivity,growth,knowledge,human capital,technology diffusion

The Employment Impact Of Globalisation In Developing Countries

The relationship between globalization and employment is of growing significance to policy makers in developing countries, but is surprisingly difficult to analyse theoretically and empirically. 'Globalization' means different things to different analysts and it is so multi-faceted that its effects are difficult to isolate and evaluate. Received trade theory does not provide a clear guide to its employment effects and in its most commonly used version it assumes away many factors that affect employment during globalization. Much finally depends on the ability of each country to cope with the liberalised trade, investment and technology flows that globalization implies. As this ability varies widely across the developing world - and is continuing to diverge between countries - it appears that no generalisation about the globalization-employment relationship is possible.

The Future of the Internet III

Presents survey results on technology experts' predictions on the Internet's social, political, and economic impact as of 2020, including its effects on integrity and tolerance, intellectual property law, and the division between personal and work lives

Information Markets and Nonmarkets

As large amounts of data become available and can be communicated more easily and processed more e¤ectively, information has come to play a central role for economic activity and welfare in our age. This essay overviews contributions to the industrial organization of information markets and nonmarkets, while attempting to maintain a balance between foundational frameworks and more recent developments. We start by reviewing mechanism-design approaches to modeling the trade of information. We then cover ratings, predictions, and recommender systems. We turn to forecasting contests, prediction markets, and other institutions designed for collecting and aggregating information from decentralized participants. Finally, we discuss science as a prototypical information nonmarket with participants who interact in a non-anonymous way to produce and disseminate information. We aim to make the reader familiar with the central notions and insights in this burgeoning literature and also point to some open critical questions that future research will have to address

Ambition and Talent

We develop a career concerns model in which agents differ in taste for income in addition to ability, and derive basic implications of this framework. We argue that the model captures important aspects of ambition. Since ambitious agents are expected to work harder – and therefore be paid more – than unambitious ones, everyone might be induced to work hard to prove that they are ambitious. On the other hand, proving one’s ambition can be detrimental, because past outputs will be taken by the principal to reflect lower ability. Thus, “ambition-proving incentives” are likely to increase effort early in the career and decrease it later. Over a long horizon, ambition-proving incentives have a tendency to bootstrap themselves, and, if this effect is strong enough, to create significant incentives with little else motivating the agent. Finally, we discuss in detail two consequences of our framework for organizational design. To maximize effort, the principal wants to cater incentives to the best-performing employees, and wants to observe a measure of the agent’s effort (say, his hours) early, but not late, in the career.

Money Out of Thin Air: The Nationwide Narrowband PCS Auction

The Federal Communications Commission held its first auction of radio spectrum at the Nationwide Narrowband PCS Auction in July 1994. The simultaneous multiple-round auction, which lasted five days, was an ascending bid auction in which all licenses were offered simultaneously. This paper describes the auction rules and how bidders prepared for the auction. The full history of bidding is presented. Several questions for auction theory are discussed. In the end, the government collected $617 million for ten licenses. The auction was viewed by all as a huge success-an excellent example of bringing economic theory to bear on practical problems of allocating scarce resources.Auctions; Spectrum Auctions; Multiple-Round Auction