Telecommunications Policy
Community-wide broadband adoption and student academic achievement
This study examines the relationship between broadband adoption and county-level educational achievement in the US in which a novel measure of home broadband subscriptions to explore longitudinal community impacts of broadband adoption on aggregated standardized test scores in math and reading/language arts for students enrolled in 3rd-8th grades. A panel was created of US counties and measured the effect of broadband adoption on student educational achievement by estimating a fixed effect estimator. Key highlights from the research showed the following:
The geopolitics of digital rights activism: Evaluating civil society's role in the promises of multi-stakeholder internet governance
Multistakeholderism is thought to play an important role in democratizing internet governance institutions and processes by including civil society. Therefore, scholars have studied the participation of civil society organizations, from the first phase of the World Summit on the Information Society through to the most recent Internet Governance Forum, to understand how they engage in and shape internet governance.
Internet access and cardiovascular death in the United States
As high-speed internet becomes increasingly important as a resource for cardiovascular disease (CVD) prevention and management services, gaps in digital infrastructure may have a detrimental impact on health outcomes. Using national census and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data from 2018, researchers evaluated state-level rates of household internet access and age-adjusted cardiac mortality.
Privacy framing in congressional hearings after Cambridge Analytica (Telecommunications Policy)
Submitted by dclay@benton.org on Thu, 08/25/2022 - 10:40Can one laptop per child reduce digital inequalities? ICT household access patterns under Uruguay's Plan Ceibal
The study of information and communications technology (ICT) adoption signals that diffusion processes within highly unequal societies produce stratification in the access to digital technologies
Voices from Northern Canada: Integrating stakeholder expectations in telecom policy for rural, remote and Northern regions (Telecommunications Policy)
Submitted by Grace Tepper on Mon, 06/20/2022 - 22:04The tribal digital divide: Extent and Explanations
This paper documents home Internet access, types of Internet access, connection speeds, and prices for basic home Internet in tribal areas of the United States. It finds that the share of households with Internet access is 21 percentage points lower in tribal areas than in neighboring non-tribal areas.
Impact of broadband penetration on U.S. Farm productivity: A panel approach
This paper uses data on broadband connections and the production and sales of agricultural products to empirically estimate the impact of improved connectivity on U.S. farming outcomes. The Federal Communications Commission has detailed data on broadband subscriptions from its semi-annual Form 477 collection.
What $2.5 billion can buy: The effect of the Broadband Initiatives Program on farm productivity
This paper investigates whether the Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP), implemented as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) had a positive impact on farm productivity, defined as farm sales per farm employment, in the counties that received any BIP funding. The effect of BIP on the growth of farm sales was examined for the 2008–2010, 2008–2011, 2008–2012 and 2008–2013 periods.