The author analyzes the effects of the expansion of broadband Internet access from 1999 to 2007 on labor market outcomes throughout the United States. Recent federal policy programs have allocated $18 billion toward subsidizing the spread of this technology, especially to rural areas. Understanding the interplay between technology, firms, and the labor market is important for evaluating whether additional scarce government resources should be allocated to improve this type of infrastructure. Using models that include county and time fixed effects, the author finds that gaining access to broadband services in a county is associated with approximately a 1.8 percentage point increase in the employment rate, with larger effects in rural and isolated areas. Most of the employment gains result from existing firms increasing the scale of their labor demand and from growth in the labor force. These results are consistent with a theoretical model in which broadband technology is complementary to skilled workers, with larger effects among college-educated workers and in industries and occupations that employ more college-educated workers. B roadband is an advanced telecommunication technology that allows data to be transmitted at increasingly faster speeds and is crucial for the Internet to realize its true potential in terms of equal access and benefits to users. This technology is primarily deployed by private-sector firms, and diffusion proceeds from places where the technology is most profitable, such as urban areas, to other areas. The digital divide between areas that have broadband and those that do not is a serious policy concern because of the common belief that lack of access to a high-speed Internet connection has adverse economic and social costs in unserved areas. This article uses the major expansion in broadband access between 1999 and 2007, when coverage went from 60% of the population to 96%, to evaluate the effect of broadband deployment on labor market outcomes.

Electronic health records (EHRs) adoption has become nearly universal during the past decade. Academic research into the effects of EHRs has examined factors influencing adoption, clinical care benefits, financial and cost implications, and more. We provide an interdisciplinary overview and synthesis of this literature, drawing on work in public and population health, informatics, medicine, management information systems, and economics. We then chart paths forward for policy, practice, and research.

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In this paper, we examine the effect of the adoption of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) systems to neighboring hospitals. We find that although EMR systems increases the operational costs for adopting hospitals, it has significant spillover effects by reducing the health care costs of the other hospitals in the same region (possibly due to patient mobility and better care that is provided by these systems). These regional externalities are stronger especially in the long term. Our results provide support to the role of EMR investments in reducing overall health care costs. Estimates, based on our results, suggest that EMR investments can lead to net reduction in national health care cost by about $47 billion dollars over 4 years.