Many of Africa’s poor live in low-rainfall areas where relatively large investments may be needed to increase agricultural productivity. This paper uses the results from an assessment of expected returns to research on soil fertility management at the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute to explore the extent to which such investments can be justified on efficiency and equity grounds. While re...

Limitations in our ability to adequately forecast the expected value of IT investments represent a notable impediment to efforts to develop business cases that can be relied upon when making IT investment decisions. This undermines the effectiveness of these decisions and threatens the benefits that a portfolio of IT investments ultimately delivers. Since IT investment decisions have direct imp...

This article explores the historical IT value research, discusses its applicability to IT investments in healthcare, and highlights how it is challenged by several factors unique to the healthcare industry.The integration of historical IT value research with healthcare industry attributes provides an important context for understanding why the IT value proposition in healthcare has been so elus...

What is the role of information technology (IT) in enabling the outsourcing of manufacturing plant production processes? Do plant strategies influence production outsourcing? Does production process outsourcing influence plant performance? This research addresses these questions by investigating the role of IT and plant strategies as antecedents of production outsourcing, and evaluating the imp...

We develop a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous fi rms à la Melitz (2003), where both the government and fi rms can invest into R&D to improve the country’s technological potential. A higher technological potential raises the average productivity of fi rms, thus implying lower consumer prices, and eventually leads to a welfare gain. The government’s public and fi rms’ private investme...

In this presentation I explore the relationship between health at birth and academic outcomes using administrative panel data from Chile. Twins fixed effects models estimate a persistent effect of birth weight on academic achievement while OLS and siblings fixed effects models find this relationship to decline over time. We make sense of these findings in the context of a model of human capital...

The National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) intramural research program conducts basic and biobehavioral symptom science research and provides training opportunities to the next generation of scientists. Recently, the NINR developed the Symptom Science Model to guide research. The model begins by identifying a complex symptom, which is then characterized into a phenotype with biological a...

We propose and test a conceptual model allowing for investigating the microeco nomic impact of investments in telecoms. While the impact of investments in telecoms on the macroeconomic outcomes has been previously investigated, there seems to be no published research that looked at the microeconomic impact of telecom investments. The proposed conceptual model links investments in telecoms with ...