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To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.infoecopol.2007.04.003 Byline: Lorin Hitt, Prasanna Tambe Keywords: Digital divide; Broadband adoption; Telecommunications policy; Media; Internet Abstract: We explore how broadband access drives changes in the quantity and diversity of consumption of online content by using panel data that describes household Internet usage before and after broadband adoption. Our data suggests that on average, broadband adoption increases usage by over 1300min per month. We also find that information consumption becomes more evenly distributed within the population, driven in part by post-adoption usage gains of almost 1800min per month among individuals who were in the lowest usage quintile before adopting broadband. After adopting broadband, this pre-adoption lowest-usage quintile consumes content in greater quantities than users in neighboring quintiles, passing both the second and third quintiles in terms of absolute usage. This suggests that these users may have had strong preferences for high-bandwidth content that was too costly to consume in a narrowband environment. We also show that broadband adoption increases the variety of content that users consume although many of these gains appear to be associated with an increase in the variety of sites visited within previously visited content categories rather than an expansion in the types of content consumed. Author Affiliation: Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Suite 500, Jon M. Huntsman Hall, 3730 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19014, United States

The article discusses how offshore outsourcing affects workers in the field of information technology (IT). It is reported that offshore outsourcing is common practice for high-technology firms and IT jobs. IT workers are displaced due to this phenomenon at twice the rate of workers in other fields. It is noted that services which can be delivered effectively through telecommunications are the most easy to outsource, and an argument is presented that this trend is likely to cause a shift in the skill sets of domestic U.S. IT workers.

There is a substantial gap between the promise and reality of artificial intelligence in human resource (HR) management. This article identifies four challenges in using data science techniques for HR tasks: complexity of HR phenomena, constraints imposed by small data sets, accountability questions associated with fairness and other ethical and legal constraints, and possible adverse employee reactions to management decisions via data-based algorithms. It then proposes practical responses to these challenges based on three overlapping principles—causal reasoning, randomization and experiments, and employee contribution—that would be both economically efficient and socially appropriate for using data science in the management of employees.

The authors investigate whether electronic medical record (EMR) systems are associated with higher levels of nursing home performance. Their difference-in-differences analysis is based on a survey of health care information technology (HIT) use in approximately 304 New York State nursing homes, combined with regulatory data from the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Studies (CMS) Nursing Home Compare database and the New York State RHCF-4 financial reports. For nursing home owners, the authors find a positive effect of EMR-system implementation, on the order of 1% higher productivity, 3% greater efficiency, but approximately 2.7% higher cost. They also find that EMR systems amplify the returns to modern workplace organization. Facilities that are one standard deviation higher on a work-organization scale—composed of practices that encourage employee collaboration, decision making, suggestions, and problem solving—have no adverse cost impact of adoption of HIT, and adoption of HIT is associated with a productivity increase of 1.5% or more. They find no evidence of an impact on health care quality.

A response by Prasanna B. Tambe and Lorin M. Hitt to a letter to the editor about their article "How Offshoring Affects IT Workers” in the October 2010 issue is presented.