Flawed Study Flunks Test on Municipal Broadband

As with many past industry-supported attacks on municipal broadband, it will take some time for interested readers to dig into the details of the University of Pennsylvania Law School professor Christopher Yoo’s study and fully understand its strengths and weaknesses. That will occur in due course. There are, however, a number of serious problems with this study that leap out at once.

For one thing, almost immediately after releasing their report, the authors issued a press release acknowledging that they had “erroneously stated that the bonds used to finance the projects in Chattanooga, TN; Lafayette, LA; and Wilson, NC; call for balloon payments toward the end of their bond terms.” While the authors claim that this error did not affect their financial analysis, one wonders how many other serious errors exist in the study—and how many other times the authors took shortcuts instead of reviewing the full available data. Perhaps if they had contacted the cities at issue to verify the data, they could have caught this mistake in advance. Apparently, they skipped that step as well. A particularly important shortcoming of the study is that the choice of 2010 through 2014 as the study period introduced significant selection bias. Another problem with the Yoo study is that the boldness of its conclusions is undermined by the many caveats and qualifications set forth at various points in the study.