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Seminar

Investment and Usage of the Subsea Internet Cable Network

Microeconomics seminar

Add to calendar 2024-10-22 14:00 2024-10-22 15:15 Europe/Rome Investment and Usage of the Subsea Internet Cable Network Seminar Room 3rd Floor Villa La Fonte YYYY-MM-DD
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When

22 October 2024

14:00 - 15:15 CEST

Where

Seminar Room 3rd Floor

Villa La Fonte

In this seminar, Marc Rysman (Boston University) will present the paper 'Investment and Usage of the Subsea Internet Cable Network.'
This paper studies the construction and use of undersea internet cables. In our model, firms decide whether to invest in new cables and then country-level demand for data leads to flows across the cable network. Investment in any one market affects global data flows. We estimate this model using new data on cable construction and usage via moment inequalities. Decomposing growth in internet usage into growth in demand and improvements in the cable network shows that the latter is an important contributor. Our counterfactuals highlight the role of business stealing and network spillovers in generating an inefficient allocation of cables.
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