A bracketing approach for estimating regional economic impact multiplers and a procedure for assessing their accuracy

Abstract

There has been a resurgence in the use of impact multipliers of the economic base type in the United States, particularly in response to recent legislation and judicial decisions which require socioeconomic as well as environmental impact analyses. This paper presents a bracketing approach whereby upper and lower bounds of the multiplier are estimated. It also presents and applies a procedure that can be used to test the accuracy of alternative methods for estimating economic base multipliers.