The fibre broadband housing premium across three US States

Brian Whitacre

Regional Studies, Regional Science, 2024, vol. 11, issue 1, 38-62

Abstract: This paper meshes 1.7 million housing transactions across three US states (Iowa, Minnesota and Texas) between 2015 and 2021 with data on broadband infrastructure to evaluate the impact of fibre broadband availability on home prices. This was a period of dramatic fibre growth in these states: prior to 2019, fibre was only available to roughly 24% of the houses sold but rose to 54% in later years. A traditional hedonic pricing model that includes a wide array of housing characteristics and census block group-level fixed effects estimates the fibre premium at around 1% in all three states for the full 2105–2021 period. The fibre premium was higher in the earlier part of this period, likely reflecting its novelty during that time. A more rigorous instrumental variable approach estimates the fibre premium at 2% in Minnesota and 9% in Texas. A conservative national estimate of the increase in housing value from deploying ubiquitous fibre is $36 billion.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/21681376.2024.2305951 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:rsrsxx:v:11:y:2024:i:1:p:38-62

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rsrs20

DOI: 10.1080/21681376.2024.2305951

Access Statistics for this article

Regional Studies, Regional Science is currently edited by Alasdair Rae

More articles in Regional Studies, Regional Science from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().