Bento Lobo
Economic Study Documents $2.69 billion in Benefit from Chattanooga’s Community Fiber Optic Network
A new study conducted by Bento Lobo, Ph.D., head of the Department of Finance and Economics at the Rollins College of Business at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, documents $2.69 billion in community benefit during the first ten years since EPB of Chattanooga built Amerca's first Gig-speed community-wide network and used it to establish the nation’s most advanced smart grid power distribution system. Key Community Benefits from Chattanooga’s Advanced Infrastructure:
Broadband Speed and Unemployment Rates: Data and Measurement Issues
We examine the effects of broadband speed on county unemployment rates in Tennessee. We merge the older National Broadband Map dataset and the newer Federal Communications Commission dataset in lengthening our broadband access data over the period 2011-2015. Extending the dataset improves the precision of the estimates. Our panel regressions control for potential selection bias and reverse causality and show that broadband speed matters: unemployment rates are about 0.26 percentage points lower in counties with high speeds compared to counties with low speeds.