Impact of broadband quality on median income and unemployment: Evidence from Sweden

Journal article, 2022

Based on a unique and exhaustive database, including micro-level pooled cross-sectional data on 23 million observations over nine years, from 2009 to 2017, we assess whether broadband quality is correlated with income and unemployment reduction. Overall, the results do not tend to show any significant effect of download speed on either income or the unemployment rate. However, after distinguishing between educational attainment and city size, we obtained heterogeneous results. While we the results suggest a substitution effect between high-skilled workers and broadband in small and medium cities, we also show that broadband quality is positively correlated with unemployment reduction for low-skilled workers in small cities with broadband over 100 Mbit/s. However, the economic significance of the effect is rather low.