The impact of broadband speed on productivity: findings from Turkish firms

ABSTRACT

This study utilizes Propensity Score Matching and Difference in Differences techniques to investigate whether the adoption of faster broadband generates higher productivity gains compared with broadband with normal speed. The empirical results confirm the significant role of higher speed broadband for better productivity performance of firms.

KEYWORDS:

• Broadband
• download speed
• productivity
• matching

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D21
• D24
• L86
• L96

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ For detailed surveys, see Bertschek (2012); Cardona, Kretschmer, and Strobel (2013); Van Reenen et al. (2010).

² All the datasets are available under a confidential agreement and all the elaborations were conducted at the microdata research centre of TURKSTAT.

³ We employed a cleaning procedure that was mainly inspired from Hall and Mairesse (1995).

⁴ Levinsohn and Petrin (2003) assume the production technology to be of Cobb–Douglas form, in which the logarithm of a firm’s output is explained by the logarithm of labour, material inputs, and energy input and capital.

⁵ We utilize the default bandwidth from Becker and Ichino (2002) as 0.06.