This is the story of Miguel Angel de Quevedo, who pursued a career as an architect and an electric engineer before beeing elected as Mexico City alderman. This essay purporst to examine what might have been the begining of technocracy in late-nineteenth century Mexico.

This essay presents a general overview of the development of Mexico City's telephone system in the late nineteenth century, how it evolved as a private market and how the municipal government tried to regulate it, particularly when facing a US company.

In the heyday of the Porfirian Age, Mexico City saw the introduction of its first commercial telephone service by an American company. This essay presents an overview of this development and of the market it served aimed at the capital city's entrepreneur class.

In Mexico City, in the heyday of the Porfirio Díaz’s regime (1877-1911), a telephone system was developed by a private carrier, whose parent company was American Bell Telephone Company, which grew into a privately owned monopoly that served a clientele made up mostly of businessmen and...

Since its inception in Mexico City the Mexican Telephone Company tried to deal with a budding market in an organized way. to do so it used several methods and approaches, including monopy pricing, suing potential competitors for patent violations, and controling the supply of technology. This...

This is the history of the relationship between the Mexican Telephone Company and Mexico City municipal council in regard to a controversy about the government's longdrawn insistence on the telephone company to withdraw its street poles. The US company, however, based its opostition in the...

Several recent papers argue that contracts provide reference points that affect ex post behavior. We test this hypothesis in a canonical buyer-seller relationship with renegotiation. Our paper provides causal experimental evidence that an initial contract has a highly significant and...

We present an international trade model with multiproduct firms. Firms are heterogeneously endowed with two types of capabilities that jointly determine the trade-off within firms between managing a large portfolio of products and producing at low marginal cost. The model can explain many of the...

This paper reports data from a laboratory experiment on two-period moral hazard problems. The findings corroborate the contract-theoretic insight that even though the periods are technologically unrelated, due to incentive considerations principals can benefit from offering long-term contracts...

We study a continuous-time game of strategic experimentation in which the players try to assess the failure rate of some new equipment or technology. Breakdowns occur at the jump times of a Poisson process whose unknown intensity is either high or low. In marked contrast to existing models, we...