Valuing the
Virtual: The Impact of Fiber to the Home on Property Prices in
France -
Telecommunications Policy, Volume 48, Issue 4,
2024 (
PDF)
This paper examines the value that households place on very high-speed
internet access, explicitly focusing on the impact of eligibility for
Fiber to the Home (FTTH) technology on property prices. Using a Spatial
Discontinuity Design based on the border of fiber eligibility zones
which have significantly expanded under France’s Plan Très
Haut-Débit, I find that FTTH eligibility is a significant
determinant of property prices, with an average increase of 0.9 percent.
I also consider heterogeneities in FTTH valuation, accounting for
socioeconomic characteristics, local factors, and the performance of
legacy copper networks. These findings highlight the growing importance
of fast and reliable broadband access for households and have important
implications for policymakers and Internet service providers.
Impact
of Broadband Internet on Preventive Healthcare Behaviours in
Senegal (with
Pauline
Kergall) -
Economie et Statistique / Economics and Statistics,
542, 99–123, 2024 (
EN/
FR)
In sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries the main channels of morbidity
and mortality are preventable and treatable diseases. Yet, SSA countries
invest little in preventive healthcare. Available literature has shown
that providing health information can have an impact on health
behaviors. In SSA, most of the internet traffic (fixed and mobile) goes
through backbone networks. The arrival of optic fiber submarine cables
in 2010 brought broadband connectivity to Senegal, allowing access to
healthcare information online. Using the Demographic and Health Surveys
(DHS) datasets combined with the Afterfibre database, and a
Difference-in-Difference methodology, this study aims to assess the
impact of the arrival of broadband internet on preventive health
behaviors in Senegal. Broadband access is found to be positively
associated with the use of bednet, mixed results are found regarding the
use of antenatal care, while no impact on child immunization is found.
If the positive impacts of internet access are confirmed, the expansion
of broadband internet could have important positive spillover effects to
improve health through increased access to information.
From Connection to
Coordination: High-Speed Internet and Protests in Africa
What is the role of broadband Internet in shaping political
participation in Africa? This study leverages the staggered arrival of
submarine Internet cables and the terrestrial backbone network in Africa
to examine the influence of high-speed Internet on protests. Combining
large-scale cross-country surveys on political behaviors and
disaggregated data on conflict events, robust difference-in-differences
estimates indicate a significant increase in both the likelihood of
protest participation and the frequency of protests. This effect is
particularly observed in countries that actively exercise political
rights and civil liberties. The analysis explores two key
mechanisms—information dissemination and coordination facilitation—with
the latter identified as the predominant factor influencing the observed
effects.
Welfare Cost of Mobile Spectrum (Mis)allocation (with
Marc Ivaldi,
Julienne
Liang and Louise Aïmène) -
Working
Paper
The conditions of spectrum allocation or reallocation are significant in
determining the market structure in the telecom sector which in turn
affects the prices and the quality of mobile networks. In a more
concentrated market, the quantity of spectrum is less diluted, and
operators can offer higher quality to their customers; In a more
competitive market, where there are more operators, consumers can
benefit from a lower price but at the expense of less spectrum for each
operator. To address this trade-off, we first fit a demand model of
mobile telecommunications services on a unique panel database for 23
MNOs of five major European countries from 2004Q3 to 2021Q4. Notably, we
provide an adequate proxy of the mobile network quality for consumers by
combining coverage data with spectrum data. Using this estimated demand
model, we conduct a counterfactual simulation to measure the effect on
consumer surplus of the incomplete spectrum allocation and the arrival
of an additional operator in Germany. Results show that reallocating
additional spectrum to three instead of four operators is consumer
welfare improving as prices do not increase much while quality is
significantly improved.
From Bytes to Business: Mobile Broadband, Firm Creations and
Digital Divide in Tunisia (with
Mohamed
Ali Marouani)
This paper investigates the impact of mobile broadband Internet on
business creation in Tunisia. Using a rich dataset of Tunisian
delegations, the study employs a count model to assess the influence of
mobile broadband Internet quality and other infrastructure and
delegation characteristics on firm location decisions. The empirical
findings demonstrate a robust positive relationship between the density
of 4G antennas per 10,000 inhabitants and the number of new business
creations. Notably, this relationship is stronger and exhibits later
effects in rural areas, particularly on the peripheries of major urban
centers, suggesting varying rates of technology adoption and challenging
the hypothesis of the ``death of distance” that broadband Internet was
expected to bring. This research highlights the potential role of mobile
broadband in stimulating local economic growth and sheds nuanced light
on the economic implications of the digital divide.
