Home broadband and human capital formation

Jose Montalban, Rosa Sanchis-Guarner and Felix Weinhardt

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: Using administrative data, we estimate the effect of home broadband speed on student-level value-added test scores. Our headline estimate relies on jumps in connection quality between close neighbours that occur across thousands of invisible telephone exchange station catchment-area boundaries. We find that increasing speed by 1 Mbit/s increases test scores by 1.37 percentile ranks, equivalent to 5% of a standard deviation. School-level factors or broadband take-up cannot explain this. Instead, the positive effects are concentrated among high-ability and non-free-school-meal eligible students and result from more education-oriented internet use. Differences in ICT quality can thus lead to increasing education inequalities.

Keywords: broadband; education; spatial regression discontinuity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-02-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-ict and nep-ure
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Related works:
Working Paper: Home broadband and human capital formation (2024)
Working Paper: Home Broadband and Human Capital Formation (2021)
Working Paper: Home Broadband and Human Capital Formation (2021)
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