ICT and Education: Evidence from Student Home Addresses

Benjamin Faber, Rosa Sanchis-Guarner and Felix Weinhardt ()

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: Governments are making it a priority to upgrade information and communication technologies (ICT) with the aim to increase available internet connection speeds. This paper presents a new strategy to estimate the causal effects of these policies, and applies it to the questions of whether and how ICT upgrades affect educational attainment. We draw on a rich collection of microdata that allows us to link administrative test score records for the population of English primary and secondary school students to the available ICT at their home addresses. To base estimations on exogenous variation in ICT, we notice that the boundaries of usually invisible telephone exchange station catchment areas give rise to substantial and essentially randomly placed jumps in the available ICT across neighboring residences. Using this design across more than 20,000 boundaries in England, we find that even very large changes in available internet speeds have a precisely estimated zero effect on educ ational attainment. Guided by a simple model we then bring to bear additional microdata on student time and internet use to quantify the potentially opposing mechanisms underlying the zero reduced form effect. We find that jumps in the available ICT have no significant effect on student time spent studying online or offline, or on their productivity. Finally, while faster connections appear to increase student consumption of online content, we find that the elasticity of student demand for online content with respect to its time cost is negative but bounded by -1.

Keywords: Education; information and communication technology; internet (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D83 F66 I20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-ict and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (29)

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https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1359.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: ICT and Education: Evidence from Student Home Addresses (2015)
Working Paper: ICT and education: evidence from student homeaddresses (2015)
Working Paper: ICT and education: evidence from student home addresses (2015)
Working Paper: ICT and Education: Evidence from Student Home Addresses (2015)
Working Paper: ICT and Education: Evidence from Student Home Addresses (2015)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1359

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