Even though I have conducted regional economic impact studies, I’m always a bit skeptical when a project is touted as a huge payoff for taxpayer investment. Amazon’s HQ2 is a case in point. New York is claiming a $24 billion net return over 25 years from the $3.6 billion in tax breaks, based on impact analysis done with the REMI economic model. I would be interested in a retrospective analysis on the impact of Amazon’s HQ1 in Seattle. The campus is fairly self contained and it should be fairly straightforward to track the growth of Amazon employment in Seattle since the last 1990s. Clearly, there would be uncertainty about how to attribute regional economic activity to Amazon activity, but we could see bounds on various factors such as jobs and tax revenues. We could then see a comparison against the estimates for New York City.