This award supports a graduate student tutorial and workshop on the economics of digitization to be hosted by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). The NBER's Digitization Project, established in 2010, is building the foundations for an economics-oriented research community that examines the causes and consequences of digitization. Project participants are concerned with the impact of rules, policies and institutions that govern the economic incentives to create, store and use digital information. Issues of particular salience include: (1) copyright policy and innovation in the digital economy, (2) the economics of privacy and innovation with Big Data, and (3) Changing Digital Media Markets. The tutorial, which will be conducted by three leading researchers, will introduce a cohort of twenty graduate students to key topics in the economics of digitization and will emphasize open questions on the frontiers of research. After the one-day tutorial, graduate students will participate in the regular Winter Meeting of the Digitization Project and have the opportunity to interact with researchers attending the meeting.
Digitization is an important consequence of advances in computing that are transforming the economy and driving innovation. Understanding how digitization affects the economy is important in formulating appropriate policy responses. This project will advance knowledge in this field by exposing graduate students to the young and growing community of researchers concerned with digitization, and enabling them to have face-to-face interaction with research leaders that would otherwise be challenging for them to do. It also brings together like-minded researchers to share frontier research, and contributes to building the foundations for this community of scholars in this policy-relevant area.
Broader Impacts: The proposal seeks to accelerate the development of a research community around important policy issues that give rise to challenging analytical problems in a complex institutional setting. The policy issues are persistent, widespread and required responses are non-obvious. By seeding the interests of a new generation of researchers and promoting their professional development the project will encourage the expansion of important skills in the STEM workforce.
