There has been a rapid increase in global expenditure on information technology and there is still much to learn about its effects on productivity, welfare and social change. At the macro-level, it has been estimated that Internet-related value accounts for as much as 7% of GDP of some OECD economies. As discussed, two basic methods have been used to estimate the contribution of ICT to the grow...

The paper presents a general equilibrium model of a developing economy, in which the wealth distribution, the interest rate and the wage are endogenous and interact dynamically. A credit market imperfection due to limited enforcement results in credit rationing and occupational choice constraints, leading to inefficiency. Credit rationing is shown to persist as the economy develops. We also arg...

Care delivery is a complex enterprise that involves multiple interactions among multiple stakeholders. Effective communication between these dispersed parties is critical to ensuring quality and safety and improves operational efficiencies. Time and motion studies in hospital settings provide strong evidence that care providers-doctors and nurses-spend a significant proportion of their time obt...

Individuals’ inability to coordinate investment may significantly constrain economic development. In this paper we study a simple investment game characterized by multiple equilibria and ask whether an income-based incentive scheme can uniquely implement the high investment outcome. A general property of this game is the presence of a crossover investment point at which an individual’s incomes ...

Achieving allocative and technically efficient spectrum management is a key aspect of deregulatory reforms in several OECD countries. However, reform legislation offers few clues as to how these objectives should rank when they conflict with one another. An `innocent' prior acquisition of service-neutral spectrum at an efficiently run auction may prove allocative efficient but fail to be techni...

to measure an unbiased farm-specific efficiency of individual dairy farmers, a shadow-price profit frontier adjusted for market distortion was applied to a sample of 860 iranian small intensive dairy farms surveyed in 2005-2006. this measure was then compared with that of unadjusted measure that assumes undistorted market. a multiple general linear model (glm) technique was applied to the data ...

Dynamic pricing and good level of Pareto optimality make auctions more attractive for resource allocation over other economic models. However, some auction models present drawbacks regarding the high demand of communication when applied to large-scale scenarios. In a complex Grid environment, the communication demand can become a bottleneck; that is, a number of messages need to be exchanged fo...

This paper addresses the question of the social policy harmonization in the European Union. In adopting a common monetary policy Europe is faced with structural and fiscal concerns, as national growth levels di¤er. Another possible factor in output shocks are the levels of various social expenditures in the member countries. OECD data on the level of social program expenditures in four EU count...