Surfing Alone? The Internet and Social Capital: Evidence from an Unforeseeable Technological Mistake

Stefan Bauernschuster, Oliver Falck and Ludger Woessmann

No 5747, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Does the Internet undermine social capital or facilitate inter-personal and civic engagement in the real world? Merging unique telecommunication data with geo-coded German individual-level data, we investigate how broadband Internet affects several dimensions of social capital. One identification strategy uses panel information to estimate value-added models. A second exploits a quasi-experiment in East Germany created by a mistaken technology choice of the state-owned telecommunication provider in the 1990s that still hinders broadband Internet access for many households. We find no evidence that the Internet reduces social capital. For some measures including children's social activities, we even find significant positive effects.

Keywords: social capital; Internet (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2011-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ict, nep-soc and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (33)

Published - published in: Journal of Public Economics, 2014, 117, 73-89

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp5747.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Surfing alone? The internet and social capital: Evidence from an unforeseeable technological mistake (2014)
Working Paper: Surfing Alone? The Internet and Social Capital: Evidence from an Unforeseeable Technological Mistake (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp5747

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().