ICT and education: evidence from student home addresses

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

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

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 empirical 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 broadband connection speeds have a precisely estimated zero effect on educational 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. While jumps in the available ICT appear to increase student consumption of online content, we find no significant effects on student time spent studying online or offline, or on their learning productivity.

Keywords: education; information and communication technology; internet (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D83 I20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 55 pages
Date: 2015-10
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 (27)

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/65020/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
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 homeaddresses (2015)
Working Paper: ICT and Education: Evidence from Student Home Addresses (2015)
Working Paper: ICT and Education: Evidence from Student Home Addresses (2015)
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:ehl:lserod:65020

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().