Decades of research on the economic impact of computer information systems used by businesses provide the basis for assessing claims arising in litigation over such systems. It is possible to estimate the impacts of systems on costs of business operations, on market share, on margins, on flexibility of product design, and on market entry strategies. It is possible to estimate economic impacts, ...

Over the last decade macroeconomic studies have established a clear link between student achievement on science and math tests and per capita gross domestic product (GDP) growth, supporting the widely held belief that science, technology, engineering, and math(STEM) education are important factors in the production of economic prosperity. We critique studies that use science and math tests to p...

As information technology and globalization expand the horizons of economic agents’ production possibilities and decisions, interconnections between productive entities are likely not only expanding but having increasing impacts on production and productivity. Such spillovers may derive from various types of linkages, including those associated with time, space, and industry or sector. Producti...

Even prior to passage of federal welfare reform, many demonstration programs anticipated key features of the 1996 law, such as "work-first" strategies, time limits on welfare receipt, and financial incentives to work. Over the past decade, 10 experimental evaluations of these programs have extended their studies to examine the impacts on children. This article provides a synthesis of findings f...

The correlation between health and economic performance is extremely robust across communities and over time. Many factors exogenous to income play an important role in determining health status, including a number of geographical, environmental, and evolutionary factors. This suggests the existence of simultaneous impacts of health on wealth and wealth on health. Potential health impacts on na...

Prison construction was a noticeable component of economic development initiatives in rural places during the 1980s and the 1990s. Yet, few comprehensive ex post-empirical studies have been conducted and therefore the literature remains inconclusive about the economic impacts of prisons. Following a temporal overview of the geography of prison development and associated characteristics, this re...

Conditional cash transfer programs have spread to over 80 countries in the past two decades, but little is known about their long-term effects on the youth they target. This paper estimates the impact of childhood exposure to the Mexican program Progresa on economic outcomes in early adulthood by leveraging the age structure of program benefits and geographic variation in early program penetrat...

We develop a patent analysis approach to discover types of IT innovations and examine their technological and economic impacts. Our empirical investigation is based on 73,120 patents in the medical devices industry filed between 1996 and 2005. Rather than relying on pre-established classifications of IT innovations, we apply textual analysis to patent abstracts and map the extracted IT innovati...

This paper examines the relationship between regional economic integration and FDI in North America, where two RIAs have been established over the past decade: a bilateral free trade agreement between Canada and the U.S. (CUSTA) and a trilateral agreement (NAFTA) incorporating Mexico as well. The North American experiences suggest substantially more modest impacts of regional trade agreements o...

Most structural and some nonstructural water projects require significant sunk costs and lead to uncertain economic and ecological outcomes. For instance, building irrigation or flood control dam requires sizable sunk cost, an investment that is difficult to recover later. The dam faces uncertainties in terms of future rainfall, the performance of the dam’s structures and downstream levees, the...