Economics professor Derek Jones was an invited discussant at the Annual CEPR/WDI Annual International Conference on Transition Economics in Riga, Latvia in June 2002. He is also a Research Associate of the William Davidson Institute, a co-sponsor of the event.
Jones, The Irma M. and Robert D. Morris Professor of Economics, attended the 11th Conference of the International Association for the Economics of Participation (a professional association of which he is a past president) at the Catholic University of Brussels (Katholieke Universiteit Brussel - K.U.B.)in July 2002. He delivered an invited keynote talk on "Employee Participation in the US and Japan: An Assessment of Recent Changes and Comparisons with Europe." He also presented a paper with Associate Professor of Economics Jeffrey Pliskin titled "Information Technology and High Performance Workplace Practices: Evidence on Their Incidence from Upstate New York Establishments." This paper was based on work supported by Hamilton's Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center.
Jones also presented a paper (with Mark Klinedinst) titled "Ownership Changes in Bulgarian Enterprises: Causes and Consequences." This paper was a preliminary product of a project for which he is the project director titled "The Determinants of Business Performance During Reform: A Panel Study of Bulgarian establishments" under the auspices of the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research and the William Davidson Institute.
Jones also attended a workshop this summer at the Mondragon Cooperative Consortium, Mondragon, Spain, titled "Co-operatives and Worker Participation in Enterprise Results."
The consortium is the seventh largest conglomerate in Spain and comprises one of the most highly developed set of worker cooperatives in the world.
Currently he is a visiting professor at the Institute for Innovation Research, Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, where he will stay until October 2002. While at the institute he will work on several projects including IT innovation in Japan and the nature and the effects of new forms of compensation in Japan.
