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The Arrival of Fast Internet and Employment in Africa - Comment

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  • Roodman, David

Abstract

Hjort and Poulsen (2019) frames the staggered arrival of submarine Internet cables on the shores of Africa circa 2010 as a difference-in-differences natural experiment. The paper finds positive impacts of broadband on individual- and firm-level employment and nighttime light emissions. These results largely are not robust to alternative ge-ocoding of survey locations, to correcting for a satellite changeover at end-2009, and to revisiting a definition of the treated zone that has no clear technological basis, is narrower than the spatial resolution of nearly all the data sources, and is empirically suboptimal as a representation of the geography of broadband.

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  • Roodman, David, 2024. "The Arrival of Fast Internet and Employment in Africa - Comment," I4R Discussion Paper Series 148, The Institute for Replication (I4R).
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:i4rdps:148
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