Impact of fast internet access on employment: Evidence from a broadband expansion in China

Xin Jin, Baojie Ma and Haifeng Zhang

China Economic Review, 2023, vol. 81, issue C

Abstract: This paper investigates whether and how broadband internet development affects employment in China. The temporal and spatial variations in Broadband China Strategy implementation allow for applying a staggered difference-in-differences (DID) to identify the intention-to-treat effects of the increased availability of broadband on labor market outcomes. Robust results show that broadband internet development will not affect the employment rate for low- and high-skilled workers. Furthermore, broadband internet development improves low-skilled workers' contract signing, pension, and medical insurance participation by 11.5%, 17%, and 19.8%, respectively but has no significant impact on high-skilled workers. Potential mechanisms can be divided into two aspects. At the micro level, broadband internet development mitigates information friction and increases the probability of online learning for low-skilled workers. Meanwhile, at the macro aspect, adopting broadband Internet enhances firms' productivity where low-skilled workers are most concentrated (manufacturing industry). The heterogeneous results suggest younger and rural workers benefit more. Our findings have great significance in eliminating concerns about broadband investment in developing countries.

Keywords: Broadband China Strategy; Employment; Low-skilled worker; Inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1043951X23001232
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:eee:chieco:v:81:y:2023:i:c:s1043951x23001232

DOI: 10.1016/j.chieco.2023.102038

Access Statistics for this article

China Economic Review is currently edited by B.M. Fleisher, K. X. D. Huang, M.E. Lovely, Y. Wen, X. Zhang and X. Zhu

More articles in China Economic Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().