Spillovers from Wiring Schools with Broadband: The Critical Role of Children

Abstract

Providing broadband to schools can be an effective way to foster household Internet adoption in neighboring areas. On the one hand, the infrastructure put into place to meet schools' needs can also serve households. On the other hand, students get acquainted with Internet at school and signal its usefulness to adults at home who, consequently, can be more likely to adopt it. In this paper we model the roles that broadband use at school and Internet adoption in neighboring households play in the decision to adopt Internet at home and measure their effects empirically. We use data from Portugal between 2006 and 2009 on household Internet penetration and on how much schools use broadband. We use two different sets of instruments for the schools' broadband use to alleviate endogeneity concerns. Both approaches yield similar results. We find that broadband use at school leads to higher levels of Internet penetration in neighboring households. Broadband use in schools was responsible for a year-over-year increase of 3.5 percentage points on Internet penetration in households with children. Across our dataset this effect accounts for about 17% of the increase in home Internet adoption. We also find evidence of regional spillovers in Internet adoption across households. These were roughly responsible for an increase of 2.1 percentage points in Internet penetration or 38% of the total increase in household Internet penetration between 2006 and 2009. These results show that wiring schools with broadband is an effective policy to lower the barriers for Internet adoption at home and as such contributes to accelerate the pace of broadband diffusion.

Home Broadband and Human Capital Formation

“…5 An important strand of the literature analyzes the effects of ICT in school settings. Most of this previous work uses experimental and quasiexperimental methods, finding mixed results but typically no consistent impacts on math or reading educational achievement (Angrist & Lavy, 2002;Rouse & Krueger, 2004;Goolsbee & Guryan, 2006;Machin et al, 2007;Belo et al, 2014Belo et al, , 2016Falck et al, 2018). Our study is different because we study the effects of broadband access at home.…”

Examining the Relationship of Information and Communication Technologies Use and Reading Literacy: A Moderated-Mediation Analysis of Metacognition Across Information and Communication Technologies Use Intensity

“…The findings of this study confirmed our hypothesis that student ICT use intensity moderated the links of all three types of ICT use and their reading literacy, which is consistent with the research of (Gubbels et al, 2020) This similar effect pattern across ICT use intensity can be explained as follows. The positive effects of low ICT use on reading literacy can be explained by the fact that the original introduction of the computer and broadband enabled student access to more useful resources and provided helpful and interesting functions that attracted students' attention to learning (Barrow et al, 2009;Belo et al, 2016). With the increasing intensity of ICT use, and as ICT tools were expanded to be used in wider areas and in diverse ways, such as for leisure or social activities, student attention begins to be distracted from learning to some degree (Leuven et al, 2007).…”

“…The positive effects were also found in literature that have explored specific ICT tools’ influence on students’ learning. For example, studies by Barrow et al (2009) and Belo et al (2016) found that students who used computer programs performed better in reading than those who were exposed to traditional teaching methods. Grimes and Warschauer (2008) and Lai et al (2015) indicated that the use of ICT devices in the classroom can improve student academic performance in English and math at the end of 2 years of their participation.…”

Spillover Effects of Financial Education: The Impact of School-Based Programs on Parents

“…Financial education has proven to be very effective to both increase financial knowledge and positively affect financial choices (14). Virtually all governments that have developed a financial inclusion strategy have included financial education as a key component.…”