Digital Infrastructure: Regional Socioeconomic Effects of Mobile Internet in Germany

Tasks

Successfully managing the digital transformation is crucial for the medium and long run competitiveness of the German economy. An appropriate digital infrastructure is a key requirement for the adoption of new technologies and enables societies to reap the benefits arising from new technologies. At the same time, expanding and upgrading digital infrastructure is costly. From an economics perspective this poses the questions, what the expected economic effects from infrastructure are, if and how the state should support infrastructure expansion, and which strategies are best to serve our societies’ goals?

To date, the literature has predominantly evaluated the effects of cable-bound Internet availability. Confirmed are positive effects (among others) on economic growth (Czernich et al., 2011), information flows and voting behavior (Falck et al., 2014) and labor market outcomes (Akerman et al., 2015). However, studies on the socioeconomic effects of mobile Internet are surprisingly rare.

This project aims to fill this gap in the literature by studying the effects of digital infrastructure expansion for mobile Internet in Germany. Overarching questions are: Is a comprehensive geographic coverage with broadband mobile Internet (4G/5G) reasonable? Can regions profit from targeted expansion of mobile Internet infrastructure? How does mobile Internet change the structure of the labor market and the professional life of employees?

Methods

Contrafactual analysis using microeconometric methods.

Data and other sources

Geo data, individual data, regional data, firm data.