The Role of Broadband Infrastructure in Building Economic Resiliency in the United States during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Raúl Katz and Juan Jung ()
Additional contact information
Raúl Katz: Columbia Institute for Tele-Information, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA
Juan Jung: ICADE, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales, Universidad Pontificia Comillas, 28015 Madrid, Spain

Mathematics, 2022, vol. 10, issue 16, 1-14

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to study the role of broadband in mitigating the economic losses resulting from COVID-19 in the United States by providing a necessary infrastructure to keep economic systems operating, albeit partially. The study is based on an empirical framework underlined by a Cobb–Douglas production function and estimated within a structural multi-equation model through the three-stage least squares approach. To consider the impact of COVID-19 on the economy, we rely on two main variables: an indicator of the quantity of deaths attributed to the disease for every 100,000 inhabitants; and the Stringency Index, a metric linked to the intensity of social restrictions imposed by national and local governments. The main contribution of this article is to provide robust evidence for how the heterogeneous effects of the pandemic across states are in part explained by differences in broadband adoption. Our results indicate that those states with higher broadband adoption were able to mitigate a larger portion of their economic losses derived from the pandemic-induced lockdowns. Addressing the digital divide and ensuring universal access to broadband represent critical goals for building economic resilience to face future emergencies.

Keywords: telecommunications; broadband; digitization; resilience; COVID-19; pandemics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7390/10/16/2988/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7390/10/16/2988/ (text/html)

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:gam:jmathe:v:10:y:2022:i:16:p:2988-:d:892000

Access Statistics for this article

Mathematics is currently edited by Ms. Emma He

More articles in Mathematics from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().