Each month, the MIT SMR Strategy Forum poses a single question to our panel of experts in the fields of business, economics, and management. This month’s question asks our panel whether restrictions on skilled immigration in the United States will cause business to shift operations overseas.

Democracy is fundamental to business interests — yet business leaders have been mostly silent when it comes to the recent cyberattacks on elections in the U.S. and other western democracies. This needs to change, and fast.

Digital titans with access to large quantities of data are a challenge to competition. To maintain a competitive business environment, regulation focusing on both market and data dominance needs to be developed. Among the best tools for limiting companies’ influence: data audits.

The patent system and the standards system, which have together kindled a generation of unparalleled technological advancement, are being wrongly targeted as impediments to future progress. Public policies aimed at weakening the patent and standards systems risk stalling the pace of technological advancement.

AI’s most potent, long-term economic value may lie not in the thousands of new startups, but in the ability of AI to augment the discovery and pursuit of basic scientific advances that could be the foundations of new industry.

The U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Accord stems from a fundamental disagreement over whether industries and markets have world-changing power. The irony: Despite his strong stance on market solutions, the President’s position on climate change assumes markets to be weaker, not stronger.

Business needs to show leadership in sustainability as it never has before. As regulations and guidelines loosen, some organizations may give in to the temptation to let profit motives soften their own environmental policies. To do so would be shortsighted — and not only for the most obvious reasons.

The Trump administration has an aggressive stance about finding new American manufacturing jobs, which could pressure some companies to consider bringing overseas operations back to the U.S. But the task is complex. “While the macroeconomic data on comparative labor and factor costs may be compelling, the actual process of reshoring — bringing assembly work back from abroad — is hard work,” wrote Harvard Business School’s Willy C. Shih, in a 2014 article in MIT Sloan Management Review.

How do businesses prepare for changes to the environment they operate in brought about by a highly charged political upheaval? When it comes to strategic planning in uncertain times and political change, what’s right for a company depends on its circumstances, its available resources, and how management combines those resources together.

What’s happening this week at the intersection of management and technology: The pitfalls of automation; government support for AI initiatives; can computer code produce iron-clad contracts?

The Information Age has revolutionized how we shop, travel and entertain ourselves—and yet we know little about how digitization has impacted the economy. That’s because the main gauge of economic growth, Gross Domestic Product, doesn’t capture much of the value created by “information goods.”

Even the best laid plans can cause unintended consequences. But organizations that operate at less-than-optimal performance levels and are unable to think systematically are especially prone to surprising outcomes. Consider the impact of U.S. ethanol legislation on energy supply chains. Supply chains are complex eco-systems that often span multiple industries and geographies. Changing the balance between supply and demand can have a profound impact on each link in the chain. Failing to appreciate these far-reaching consequences can be disastrous and very difficult to undo.

American health care is undergoing a data-driven transformation — and Intermountain Healthcare is leading the way. This MIT Sloan Management Review case study examines the data and analytics culture at Intermountain, a Utah-based company that runs 22 hospitals and 185 clinics. Data-driven decision making has improved patient outcomes in Intermountain’s cardiovascular medicine, endocrinology, surgery, obstetrics and care processes — while saving millions of dollars in procurement and in its supply chain.

In the weeks following revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency’s domestic spying network taps the electronic and telephone communiqués of so many Americans, consumers have intensified their concerns about corporate complicity in government data snooping. That leads to the question: Are we at the beginning of a consumer backlash that will stymie data-sharing? Or is it inevitable that we’re moving into a new era of diminished privacy?

It seems pretty obvious that droughts and hot weather hurt agricultural output and growth, but MIT professor of economics Benjamin Olken asserts that even localized hot spells can significantly damage long-term economic growth in developing countries. In a recent paper published in the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, Olken and his colleagues found that every 1 degree Celsius increase in temperature in a poor country reduces economic growth by around 1.3 percentage points, and that higher temperatures also may reduce the rate of growth.

Because of a multiplier effect, each new high-tech job in the U.S. creates five additional jobs in the service economy, says economist Enrico Moretti.

New research shows that young people from the U.S. and Canada to Germany and South Korea are driving less, biking more and using public transportation in significantly higher numbers.

The MIT SMR and BCG 2012 Sustainability and Innovation research report “Sustainability Nears a Tipping Point” prompted an invitation to participate in a White House Sustainable Supply Chain Dialogue on March 30 in Washington, DC.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Power Profiler tells U.S. residents where their electricity comes from, and offers suggests for switching to green energy.

Police in Santa Cruz, California, are using a computer program to predict where burglaries and other crimes might take place based on past events and forecasting, and using that information to deploy resources more intelligently.