Abstract

In this paper, we estimate the effect of home high-speed internet on national test scores of students at age 14. We combine comprehensive information from between 2005 and 2008 on the telecom network, administrative student records, house prices and local amenities in England. To identify causal effects, we exploit spatial discontinuities in copper cable length, which determines broadband quality; these discontinuities are generated when the invisible boundaries of telephone exchange station catchment areas are crossed. We find that increasing broadband speed by 1 Mbit/s increases test scores by 1.37 percentile ranks, equivalent to 5% of a standard deviation in the national score distribution. The effects are not driven by other technological mediating factors or school characteristics.