Students who attend schools in low income communities have significantly lower achievement and make smaller gains than their counterparts in high income communities. Explanations for this achievement gap are generally based on constraints in financial resources. However, when equalizing...

A comprehensive data set on local telephone service prices is used to evaluate the effect of Lifeline and Linkup programs on the telephone penetration rates of low-income households in the United States. Lifeline and Linkup programs respectively subsidize the monthly subscription and initial...

Low quality infrastructure is a major barrier to economic advancement in developing countries. This paper develops an empirical framework to explain the persistence of this problem as the result of a targeted program of utility subsidies. I estimate a structural model of household demand for...

We examine the effect of race on market outcomes by selling iPods through local online classified advertisements throughout the United States in a year-long field experiment. Each ad features a photograph of the product being held by a dark- or light-skinned (“black” or “white”) hand. To...

This paper quetions whether or not mandatory unbundling delayed DSL deployment by BellSouth. By exploiting a law change in Kentucky and variation in access prices across markets, I find that deregulation in Kentucky triggered deployment, but no evidence that access prices affected deployment...

While Internet usage blossomed during the entire 1995 – 2001 time period, there was a large change in the nature of the high-speed Internet access business. Initially, connection, routing and content were three separate parts of high-speed Internet service. Cable companies initially teamed...

This paper examines how regulators set local prices in response to the changes brought on by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (“Telecom Act”). We are particularly interested in the extent to which state regulators set prices that promoted efficiency or were influenced by private-interest...

Demand for wireless data communication has risen rapidly in the past few years, raising important policy questions about how to allocate radio spectrum for this purpose. Historically, the US government has designated some spectrum for licensed use and a smaller but significant amount for...

Major changes in technology and in regulation led to the proliferation of and willingness to pay for new communication services The changes in technology enabled the changes in regulation, both through the ability to increase supply and quality, but because technological change opened the...

Spectrum auctions are used by governments to assign and price licenses for wireless communications. Effective auction design recognizes the importance of competition, not only in the auction, but in the downstream market for wireless communications. This paper examines several instruments...