Does the Internet undermine social capital or facilitate inter-personal and civic engagement in the real world? Merging … unique telecommunication data with geo-coded German individual-level data, we investigate how broadband Internet affects …-owned telecommunication provider in the 1990s that still hinders broadband Internet access for many households. We find no evidence that the …

We study how the diffusion of broadband Internet affects social capital using two data sets from the UK. Our empirical … infrastructure that was designed in the 1930s. The actual speed of an Internet connection, in fact, rapidly decays with the distance … Internet caused a significant decline in forms of offline interaction and civic engagement. Overall, our results suggest that …