In a rush to distribute subsidy dollars for broadband deployment, some advocates have proposed to use speed-test data to identify areas that lack adequate broadband. Linking detailed deployment maps from Georgia and Iowa to speed-test data, this analysis shows that speed-test data are not a...

The United States Department of Commerce, Technology Administration provided support to the Phoenix Center to study the causes and potential solutions of the Valley of Death for technology development in the United States under Study Contract No. SB1341-05-2-0023 administered by KT Consulting,...

In practice, copyright is treated by economists and analysts as a tradeoff between monopoly and the incentive to create new works. This tradeoff is between stark opposites – power and innovation. Yet, in reality, copyrighted works face numerous close substitutes. In this paper, we formally...

A recent study on piracy entitled Piracy and Movie Revenues: Evidence from Megaupload: A Tale of the Long Tail? serves up the counter-intuitive claim that piracy may increase box office sales for some films. To reach this conclusion, Tale of the Long Tail uses as an "experiment" the January 2012...

Four years ago in a paper entitled Internet Use and Depression Among the Elderly, my colleague and I presented evidence indicating that Internet use reduces symptoms of depression among older Americans (55 or older). This showing was based on the sample of over 7,000 retired persons taken from...

In this PERSPECTIVE, I correct the errors of the earlier efforts so that a more meaningful comparison can be made between the prices of triple-play offerings across municipal and privately-owned broadband providers. My work demonstrates that the claims made in these studies regarding municipal...

In a recent and unpublished study — Empirical Copyright: A Case Study of File Sharing and Music Output — Tulane University Law Professor Glynn Lunney, Jr., concludes that “file sharing has not reduced the creation of new original music.” The claim is based on the correlation of music...

With the rising cost of broadcast programming and the high-profile of “blackouts,” Retransmission Consent has earned a place at the forefront of the modern communications policy debate. To provide a framework under which to evaluate the issue, we present in this Paper an economic theory of...

Today, the Federal Government has assignments for about half of what is considered to be “beachfront” spectrum. However, most agree that Government agencies, and the Government as a whole, use and manage spectrum resources inefficiently. As such, much attention is now focused on improving...

The unbundling paradigm contained in the 1996 Telecommunications Act was one of the most ambitious regulatory experiments in American history. Yet, despite high expectations, less than a decade after codification the experiment was over. Without making any consumer welfare claims about the...