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arXiv · 2401.13694

The Arrival of Fast Internet and Employment in Africa: Comment

David Roodman
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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 -- with a bias toward skilled employment -- and on nighttime light emissions. These results largely are not robust to alternative geocoding 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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David Roodman. 2025-09-17. The Arrival of Fast Internet and Employment in Africa: Comment. https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.13694

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