Kristina McElheran

Kristina McElheran is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, where she researches how digital technologies shape firms, their performance, and the future of work. After six years on the Harvard Business School faculty, she joined the University of Toronto in 2014. Her research spans the rise of the commercial internet through the rise of cloud computing and AI-related technologies, with a focus on productivity, entrepreneurship, and worker-level impacts. Her research has appeared in Management Science, the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, the Journal of Econometrics, the American Economic Review Papers & Proceedings, Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Communications of the ACM, The Economist, and other leading outlets in the U.S. and Canada. She is a Faculty Fellow at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, which serves as a research and solutions hub at the University of Toronto dedicated to deepening understanding of technologies, societies, and what it means to be human. She is also a Digital Fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and a Fellow at the Technology and Policy Research Initiative at Boston University.

McElheran’s research addresses a fundamental puzzle in the economics of technological change: why transformative technologies so often fail to deliver on their promise, and for whom they ultimately succeed. Across studies of enterprise IT, internet adoption, data-driven decision making, predictive analytics, and artificial intelligence, she documents striking heterogeneity in how firms deploy these technologies and what outcomes follow. Her findings consistently point to the critical role of organizational context—including production strategy, management practices, workforce composition, and decision-making structures—in determining whether technology investments generate returns.

Through her affiliation with the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, McElheran has been central to major efforts to improve systematic measurement of digital transformation across the U.S. economy. In collaboration with Erik Brynjolfsson and researchers at the U.S. Census Bureau, she co-designed novel survey questions for both the Management and Organizational Practices Survey (MOPS) and the Annual Business Survey (ABS). The MOPS work, spanning the 2015 and 2021 waves, developed new measures of data-driven decision making, predictive analytics use, production strategy, and AI-related technologies—capturing dimensions of organizational practice previously unmeasured at scale. The ABS technology module, fielded to over 850,000 firms in 2018, provided the first representative snapshot of digitization, cloud computing, and AI adoption across the entire U.S. economy. These data collections, now available to researchers through the Federal Research Data Center network, have become foundational resources for the field—currently supporting over 130 active research projects and inspiring similar data collection efforts by statistical agencies in multiple countries.

McElheran’s work has had substantial impact beyond academic audiences. Her research was cited in a 2022 White House report on artificial intelligence and the workforce, and she served as an advisor to the Government of Canada on AI commercialization. She has presented her work at major central banks and international economic institutions, including the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, the Bank of Canada, the European Central Bank, the OECD, and the International Monetary Fund. Her findings on AI use, featuring studies co-authored with Erik Brynjolfsson, have been featured in outlets including ABC News, NBC News, BBC News, The Economist, The New York Times, Wired Magazine, Forbes, and Billboard Magazine, where her research has helped cut through technology “hype” to provide evidence-based perspective on actual patterns of adoption and impact.
In addition to her research, McElheran serves as a Lab Economist at Creative Destruction Lab, a global startup program for seed-stage science-based companies founded at the University of Toronto. This role keeps her connected to technological breakthroughs at the frontier and the entrepreneurial efforts required to bring them to market.

McElheran received her PhD from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management in managerial economics and strategy, as well as bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Stanford University.