The Internet has radically transformed the way we live our lives. The net changes in consumer surplus and economic activity, however, are difficult to measure because some online activities, such as obtaining news, are new ways of doing old activities while new activities, like social media,...

Countries around the world are liberalizing their telecommunications networks by privatizing incumbent state-owned firms and introducing competition. For many, this change represents a return to private provision and competition-not a new phenomenon. The beginning of the 20th century saw great...

The importance of a country's "investment climate" for economic growth has recently received much attention. The authors address the general lack of appropriate data for measuring the investment climate and its effects. The authors use a new survey of 1,500 Chinese enterprises in five cities to...

In 1996 Ghana privatized its incumbent telecommunications firm by selling 30 percent of Ghana Telecom to Telekom Malaysia, licensing a second network operator, and allowing multiple mobile firms to enter the market. The reforms yielded mixed results. Landline telephone penetration increased...

Policymakers are simultaneously concerned about the consequences of a worsening "digital divide" between rich and poor countries and hopeful that information and computing technologies could increase economic growth in developing countries. But very little research has explored the reasons for...

The universal service program in the United States currently transfers about $7.5 billion per year from telephone subscribers to certain telephone companies. Those funds are intended to help achieve particular policy goals, such as subsidizing telephone service in rural areas and making phone...

The policy world is awash with worries about spectrum shortages as demand for wireless services grows. Using data on more than 69,000 licenses from every FCC spectrum auction since 1996, this paper disentangles and quantifies the factors that differently contribute to license value. I find that,...

This paper responds to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's request for guidance in designing a national broadband plan. We argue that the U.S. market for Internet services is working well overall, as evidenced by nearly ubiquitous coverage, rapid adoption, large investments, and...

Little empirical work carefully evaluates the special access market, and even less research has focused explicitly on the effects of deregulation (pricing flexibility). This paper attempts to address that gap in the literature by exploring empirically the relationship between the different types...