The Center for Regional Economic Issues (REI), in operation at Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management from 1986 until 2005, was an outgrowth of a foundation-sponsored study of the battered Cleveland economy conducted by the Rand Corporation in 1980. In addition to assessing regional economic trends on an industry-by-industry basis—hard data that had been lacking from civic deliberations about how to reverse the region’s postwar stagnation—the California think tank’s report pointed out the benefits of establishing an ongoing capacity to conduct sophisticated economic research on which informed economic development policies and programs could be based. In partnership with the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, the Cleveland Foundation established REI in 1983 to provide hard data and analysis about the regional economy and to make this information widely available for public- and private-sector decision making. The successful effort to enhance Greater Cleveland’s capacity to monitor its economic activity was led by Susan Lajoie Eagan, who later served as the foundation’s executive vice president.