May 2019

Businesses Balk at FCC Bid to Block Robocalls

Some businesses are pushing back against a regulatory proposal that would allow phone companies to block unwanted robocalls. Representatives for trade bodies that lobby on behalf of debt collectors, banks, health-care providers and other businesses met with Federal Communications Commission officials recently, urging them to delay a planned June 6 vote on the matter and instead seek public comment, apparently. Banks, collection agencies and merchants say automated calls are crucial, even though some consumers find them annoying.

The Rewards of Municipal Broadband: An Econometric Analysis of the Labor Market

The first statistical evidence on the effects on labor market outcomes of municipal broadband systems. Using data obtained from the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, we apply the Difference-in-Differences estimator, augmented with Coarsened Exact Matching and the wild bootstrap, to quantify the economic impact, if any, of the county-wide government-owned network (“GON”) in Chattanooga (TN) on labor market outcomes. Across a variety of empirical models, we find no payoffs in the labor market from the city’s broadband investments.