Can one laptop per child reduce digital inequalities? ICT household access patterns under Plan Ceibal

The study of information and communications technology (ICT) adoption signals that diffusion processes within highly unequal societies produce stratification in the access to digital technologies and thus, maintain or even increase previous socioeconomic disparities. While technological utopians believed that One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)-like programs could reduce societal inequalities, the economics literature evaluating these initiatives has mostly focused on student's human capital. Results suggest no impact, even for successful programs such as Uruguay's own OLPC-inspired Plan Ceibal. In this paper, we use an event-study approach to difference-indifferences to identify the impact of Plan Ceibal on the household adoption of technological goods across income quintiles. Our results show that Plan Ceibal helped to bridge domestic digital disparities in terms of access to PC and favored the uptake of internet services. We discuss the potential mechanisms behind these results. Regarding household PC access, even though Plan Ceibal was conceived as a universal program targeting primary-level students attending public schools, both infantilization of poverty and a dual-system educational stratification may explain why this initiative had a heterogenous impact across different income groups. Regarding household connectivity, Plan Ceibal reduced the cost of the bundle required to consume internet services at the time of the study, improving affordability and access among households with beneficiaries of the program.     

Linguistics and Economics: Is Entrepreneurship Innate?

One of the great scientific achievements of the second half of the twentieth century was the advance in linguistics. Noam Chomsky was one of its foremost exponents. Chomsky and his followers claim that human beings have an inbuilt ‘language acquisition device’ which allows children to acquire language with extraordinary ease. Language is as much part of human nature as flying is that of birds. This paper argues that, like language, the propensity to trade is an inbuilt characteristic of human beings. Language permeates all human faculties including the ability to plan for the future. As a result human economic activity shares many important features with language, in particular its recursive and unbounded character. There is also evidence that the concept of property is innate. It follows that attempts to frustrate or limit the exercise of property rights and their use in trade works against the grain of human nature. Limits on the natural expression of entrepreneurship may be as damaging as other constraints on human flourishing.     

探析GB/T24001-2004标准4.6条款的要求与实施

本文针对目前组织实施管理评审中存在的问题,探析了GB/T24001-2004标准4.6条款要求,阐述了运用PDCA方法控制管理评审的实施要点。     

股份合作制企业股本的设置

股本设置必须充分体现股份合作制企业的本质特征,充分反映产权状况。投入资产的资本价值等于投入资产的价值乘以该资产的获利能力系数,提高科技投入比重是企业生存与发展的必然选择     

面对新的检测要求 机动车检测站应对措施

国家标准GB21861-2008将于2009年6月1日开始实行,届时现行公共安全行业标准GA468-2004<机动车安全技术检验项目和方法>将自动废止,不再实施,为了读者更好掌握新标准,保证新标准的落实执行,我们将新旧标准主要不同之处和安检机构为了适应新标准而应修改变更之处作主要的综合总结.     

On the first-order approach in principal-agent models with hidden borrowing and lending

We provide sufficient conditions for the validity of the first-order approach for two-period dynamic moral hazard problems where the agent can save and borrow secretly. The first-order approach is valid if the following conditions hold: (i) the agent has non-increasing absolute risk aversion utility (NIARA), (ii) the output technology has monotone likelihood ratios (MLR), and (iii) the distribution function of output is log-convex in effort (LCDF). Moreover, under these three conditions, the optimal contract is monotone in output. We also investigate a few possibilities of relaxing these requirements.     

BUSINESS AND FINANCIAL METHOD PATENTS, INNOVATION, AND POLICY

Court decisions in the 1990s are widely viewed as having opened the door to a flood of business method and financial patents at the US Patent and Trademark Office, and to have also impacted other patent offices around the world. A number of scholars, both legal and economic, have critiqued both the quality of these patents and the decisions themselves. This paper reviews the history of business method and financial patents briefly and then explores what economists know about the relationship between the patent system and innovation, in order to draw some tentative conclusions about their likely impact. It concludes by finding some consensus in the literature about the problems associated with this particular expansion of patentable subject matter, highlighting the remaining areas of disagreement, and reviewing the various policy recommendations.     

Are OTT messaging and mobile telecommunication an interrelated market? An empirical analysis

OTT messengers such as Facebook and WhatsApp have gained wide popularity among mobile users while the traffic of text messaging is in strong decline. As such, there is a debate over whether both services are interrelated and constitute a joint product market, which has important implications for the current wave of mergers in the mobile industry and regulation policy. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to provide an empirical analysis of how the consumption of OTT messengers affects demand for text messaging and mobile voice services. We make use of an innovative dataset which includes very detailed information on smartphone usage in Norway and consider a novel approach to address this question which is embedded in the complexity of two-sided markets. Interestingly, our findings suggest that OTT messengers complement demand for traditional mobile telecommunication services for this context. Consequently, both markets are interrelated but do not constitute a joint market from the perspective of competition policy in Norway. Moreover, we find an explanation for why reductions of text messaging usage have been so drastic in some countries and an analogous development for mobile voice is rather unlikely. Finally, our empirical results provide a new perspective on the modelling of consumer utility in communication networks in the theoretical literature.