Citing strong evidence that cell phones play a critical role in the economic prospects of low-income Americans, a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in association with a Washington think tank, reports that wider cell phone use could lead to income gains for the poor from $2.9 billion to $11 billion annually by simply allowing the poorest American households to be in touch with potential employers and other job resources.

In “Cell Phones Provide Significant Economic Gains for Low-Income American Households,” Nicholas P. Sullivan, a visiting scholar at the MIT Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship, contends that providing cell phones to the 38 percent, or roughly 17 million families, of the poorest American households now without them could lead to a significant income increase for those families, which include millions of African-Americans, Hispanics and seniors.

“Americans, and particularly those in lower-income groups, are deriving clear economic benefits — even though low-income groups are far less likely to own a cell phone,” according to the report, which was released Wednesday by the New Millennium Research Council, a Washington organization specializing in telecommunications and technology policy.

“This report is the first in the United States to zero in on the potential economic and public safety benefits in the bottom two quintiles of household incomes, those making less than $35,000 a year,” Sullivan says.

Sullivan is the author of You Can Hear Me Now: How Microloans and Cell Phones Are Connecting the World’s Poor to the Global Economy, a book published in 2007 that led to the study of cell phone use among the U.S. poor. He says the U.S. cell phone study idea arose after he received numerous questions on whether cell phone ownership helps create opportunities for poor Americans in the way it has done so for the poor in developing nations.

“Millions of Americans who are most in need are missing out today on the economic gains that other Americans attribute to their cell phones. The overall conclusion in this study is that the cell phone is extremely important to Americans for personal safety, and a huge boon to an individual’s potential economic productivity and earning power,” Sullivan notes.