Research
Discussion Papers
“Home Broadband and Human Capital Formation”, with Jose Montalbán-Castilla (SOFI at Stockholm University) and Felix Weinhardt (European University Viadrina & LSE-CEP)
Under Review
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This paper estimates the effect of home internet speed on national test scores of students at age 14. We combine comprehensive information on the telecom network, administrative student records, house prices and local amenities in England in a fuzzy spatial regression discontinuity design across invisible telephone exchange catchment areas. Using this strategy, we find that increasing broadband speed by 1 Mbit/s, an increase of 20% with respect to the baseline average speed, raises test scores by 1.37 percentile ranks in the years 2005-2008. This effect is sizeable, equivalent to 5% of a standard deviation in the national score distribution. Our results are not driven by school technological factors and they do not fade out two years later.