Bento Lobo

This study computes the realized economic value of fiber optic infrastructure in Hamilton County and the city of Chattanooga over a 15-year period from 2011 to 2025. Our estimates show that the economic value of high-speed broadband and the smart grid exceeds $5.3 billion and 10,420 jobs over the study period. The incremental value of the infrastructure exceeds the cost by a factor of 6.4x. Each county resident is estimated to have benefited by about $936 per year due to the incremental value generated by the fiber-optic infrastructure.

A new study conducted by Bento Lobo, Ph.D., head of the Department of Finance and Economics at the Rollins College of Business at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, documents $2.69 billion in community benefit during the first ten years since EPB of Chattanooga built Amerca's first Gig-speed community-wide network and used it to establish the nation’s most advanced smart grid power distribution system. Key Community Benefits from Chattanooga’s Advanced Infrastructure:

We examine the effects of broadband speed on county unemployment rates in Tennessee. We merge the older National Broadband  Map dataset and the newer Federal Communications Commission dataset in lengthening our broadband access data over the period 2011-2015. Extending the dataset improves the precision of the estimates. Our panel regressions control for potential selection bias and reverse causality and show that broadband speed matters: unemployment rates are about 0.26 percentage points lower in counties with high speeds compared to counties with low speeds.