When Narratives Replace Evidence: Employment Claims and the EPB Municipal Broadband Network

This Policy Bulletin evaluates claims that Chattanooga’s EPB municipal broadband network generated large employment gains in Hamilton County (TN). First, this Bulletin shows that the source paper invoked to justify the employment narrative explicitly finds no statistically significant employment effects in urban counties; Hamilton County is an urban county. Second, using modern causal inference methods, this Bulletin directly evaluates labor-market outcomes in Hamilton County. Across employment and unemployment outcomes, no economically or statistically significant effects are found. Third, analysis of County Business Patterns data finds no evidence that the EPB network increased business establishment growth in Hamilton County. Finally, a replication of the original broadband study using appropriate staggered-adoption methods yields small, statistically insignificant effects of worsening employment outcomes. The evidence consistently indicates that EPB’s municipal broadband deployment did not generate measurable employment benefits in Hamilton County. When public borrowing, ratepayer cross-subsidization, and federal grants are justified using employment claims, identification errors are not academic—they translate directly into misallocation of public capital.