RESEARCHER: Jason Dedrick


In the tradition of economic studies of IT and productivity, this is a proposal to study the relationship of IT to a new measure of productivity—“carbon productivity”—i.e., the economic output associated with a unit of greenhouse gas emissions. The study will use techniques from the economics of information systems to understand how IT may either increase or decrease carbon productivity at various levels: firm, industry, and national/cross-national. Such multilevel analysis will enable discovery of the extent to which the carbon impacts of IT are positive, negative or cancel out one another. The goals are to advance knowledge about IT’s carbon impacts and to inform decision makers in the private and public sectors about strategies and policies to use IT to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.