Janice Alane Hauge

Demand-Side Programs to Stimulate Adoption of Broadband: What Works?

We examine the evidence available on the efficacy of demand-side programs intended to stimulate broadband adoption. We review studies that attempt to measure results. Our suggestions for future program evaluations are to include cost-benefit analysis as a standard part of program review and to make clear that the purpose of evaluation is to assess progress made toward the ultimate policy goals rather than the programs proximate implementation goals. Appropriate data must be collected to draw conclusions, and appropriate statistical methods must be used to determine the causal impacts of a program. This has rarely been done to date.

Bureaucrats as Entrepreneurs: Do Municipal Telecommunications Providers Hinder Private Entrepreneurs?

We consider how government-owned enterprises affect privately owned rivals. Specifically, we compare the types of markets that municipally owned telecommunications providers in the United States serve to the types of markets that competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) serve. We find that CLECs focus on potential profitability while municipalities appear to respond to other factors, such as political considerations or the desire to provide competition to incumbents. As a result, municipal providers tend to serve markets that CLECs do not. We also find that the presence of a municipal provider in a market does not affect the probability that a CLEC also serves that market. Our results suggest municipalities may not pose a significant competitive threat to CLECs and do not preclude CLEC participation.

Getting What You Pay for: Analyzing the Net Neutrality Debate

We analyze the effects of networks offering and charging for premium transmission service, which is central to the net neutrality debate. We find that when a network provider optimally charges for and provides premium transmission for content providers, innovation is stimulated on the edges of the network and smaller content providers benefit more than do larger content providers. Furthermore, we show that the network provider increases its investment in network capacity when it offers premium transmission without degrading service for content providers that do not purchase the premium service. Also the number of network subscribers increases.

Participation in Social Programs by Consumers and Companies: A Nationwide Analysis of Participation Rates for Telephone Lifeline Programs

Lifeline is a unique nationwide public assistance program created by the Federal Communications Commission to provide price discounts to low-income telephone subscribers. Recently there has been concern that program participation rates are low and that there is great variation in participation across states. We examine the Lifeline Program to explain why people do not participate in a program that provides them with financial benefits. Using state-level panel data, we consider reasons Lifeline participation varies among states and why only approximately one-third of eligible households nationwide enroll in the program. We find that participation is actually closely aligned with what is predicted given state characteristics when we control for socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. We also find that in addition to the demographic factors affecting participation, telecommunications companies appear to affect Lifeline participation rates.

Subsidies and Distorted Markets: Do Telecom Subsidies Affect Competition?

There is general concern that producer subsidies distort competition. We examine a telecommunications subsidy system that transfers money from low cost regions to high cost regions of the U.S. Even though the system is designed to be competitively neutral, we find evidence that the system, combined with carrier of last resort policies, promotes cream skimming by entrants in low cost areas and deters entry in high cost areas, where incumbents are more likely than entrants to receive subsidies. We are unable to rule out the possibility that state regulatory policies favor incumbents in states that are net beneficiaries of the subsidy system.

Are Promises Meaningless in an Uncertain Crowdfunding Environment

We use a prominent crowdfunding organization, Kickstarter, to analyze the factors that determine timeliness of delivery of rewards to financial backers. We seek to determine the extent to which promised rewards are delivered on time and to characterize projects that have stronger likelihood of timely delivery of rewards. We find that lateness commonly occurs, yet cannot be explained universally with any given set of project characteristics, implying that the uncertainty of rewards involved with crowdfunding entities is difficult to overcome.

Evaluating the impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s BTOP on broadband adoption

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Acts Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) spent

Effects of Using Specific versus General Data in Social Program Research

4.7 billion during 2009-2013 to, inter alia , increase broadband adoption in underserved communities. We characterize the BTOP grants and examine the impact of the awards on broadband adoption. Econometric specifications controlling for award endogeneity related to observed and unobserved county-level factors find that spending is apparently associated with increased broadband adoption. Further investigation, however, reveals that the impacts of spending are nonlinear and even nonmonotonic over the range of county-level BTOP spending in the data. Controlling for trends to reduce the potential for spurious correlation between spending and outcomes removes most of the significance of the results. We conclude with three lessons for policymakers derived from the uncertain outcomes of BTOP spending found in our exploration.

Incentive for Aggression in American Football

We present a comparison of results of similar analyses of a particular social program using two sources of data: one representative of the general population, and one representative of the population that actually is eligible for the social program. To do this, we focus on a particular public assistance program as implemented in Florida as our public policy program of choice. We compare the results of an analysis of the programs participation rates using US Census data for the general population of Florida to the results of the exact same model using a dataset that includes only the population of Florida that is actually eligible for the program. We find that while generally signs of effects remain the same, they do not always remain the same; moreover, significance differs, and the marginal effects of various demographic and socio-economic factors on program participation rates vary greatly. We submit that such differences are important for policymakers to recognize so that they can effectively target programs to those individuals and geographic areas most in need of such programs.

What’s in a Name? Analyzing the Evolving Concept of Broadband

This chapter focuses on the United States’ National Football League (NFL) and the continuing attempt to control the level of violence inherent in the game. The study uses data from 1995 to 2009 to analyze the effect of violence and aggression on the success of a team and on fan attendance. Results show that penalties are negatively associated with wins from 1995 through 2005; after 2005, this relationship is statistically insignificant, although trends apparent in the data make it essential to watch the progression of this relationship. In addition, data suggest a correlation between attendance and more egregious rule infractions over the past five seasons; however, such correlation is not found to be statistically significant.