Center for Economic Evaluation
We are committed to rigorous and transparent economic analyses that generate evidence-based insights for more effective systems, policies, and practices.
The Center for Economic Evaluation (CEE) supports high-quality economic evaluations to better understand the cost, cost-effectiveness, and cost-benefit of programs in the fields of education, health, international development, and the workforce.
- We partner with leaders, organizations, and communities to analyze costs and outcomes to provide insights that are both actionable and evidence-based.
- We lead the field in raising the standards of economic evaluation to provide policymakers, practitioners, and funders with the information they need to make investment decisions.
Goals
Our work is driven by a commitment to help clients make informed decisions that improve outcomes for people and communities. We strive to:
Perform economic evaluations using best practices that meet the highest possible standards;
Promote the use of evidence-based insights that inform investment decisions;
Communicate findings in meaningful ways to a wide variety of audiences including policymakers, practitioners, funders, researchers, and the public; and
Foster innovation to improve the quality and usefulness of evaluation findings.
What We Do
The Center brings together highly experienced researchers who have spent decades refining economic evaluation methods to help clients understand which programs are effective and at what cost.
As leading experts in this field, the Center provides services including:
Partnership with clients to conduct economic evaluations as either the study centerpiece or as a compliment to other investigations (e.g., impact, implementation, or fidelity analyses);
Consultation on all phases of conducting an economic evaluation including planning, data collection, analysis, reporting, and dissemination; and
Strategic communication of findings that meet the needs of a variety of audiences, including policymakers, practitioners, funders, researchers, and the public.
Types of Economic Evaluation
Our experts specialize in three types of economic evaluation:
- Cost Analysis: We identify, describe, and estimate the value of resources needed to implement a program, including staff time, materials, training, facilities, and technology. These cost estimates help decisionmakers understand the cost of implementation and plan for long-term sustainability.
- Cost-Effectiveness Analysis: We analyze program cost and effectiveness to show how much it costs to achieve specific outcomes. This information helps decisionmakers identify programs that produce desired outcomes most cheaply.
- Cost-Benefit Analysis: We combine program cost information with financial measures of the outcomes produced to determine whether the generated benefits outweigh the investment. Decision-makers can use these measures to decide if a given program is a worthwhile investment or to select from several program options associated with different combinations of costs and benefits.
Featured Work
Spotlight on Early Childhood Cost and Finance
AIR’s early childhood cost and finance team informs state decisions about the cost of high-quality early care and education, the systems that support it, and revenue sources that can fund it. Our work has focused on childcare subsidies, a variety of preschool models, and supporting Early Intervention and Special Education for children from birth to five-years-old with developmental delays.
Benefits and Costs of Special Olympics Flagship Program
AIR economic evaluation experts conducted a study for Special Olympics International investigating the implementation of the Unified Champion Schools program in a sample of high schools from across the United States.
Out-of-School Time Cost Study
With funding from the Wallace Foundation, AIR is using state-of-the-field methods to develop timely and relevant estimates of Out-of-School Time (OST) program costs. Through gaining a better understanding of the staff and resources used to operate OST programs and corresponding costs, the results provide valuable insight as to the funding that is necessary to support such programs.
Research Standards for Investigations of Employment and Job Training Programs
Under a project funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families, AIR developed a first of its kind set of research standards for evaluating the quality of economic evaluations included in studies being reviewed for the Pathways to Work Evidence Clearinghouse.
