Three Empirical Studies on Technology, Public Policy, and Inequality in the United States

This dissertation is comprised of three essays focusing on the economic measurement of private business wealth and separately, the role and dissemination of broadband internet. In Chapter 1, I study the broad effects of the introduction of fiber broadband, through the lens of student achievement. I implement a difference-in-differences design and find a modest impact on educational outcomes, roughly on par with lowering class sizes by one student. In addition, I show fiber increases local employment and search intensity for supplementary educational materials (e.g., Khan Academy). Last, I show that increased competition from fiber providers drives quality improvements in other available technology. Chapter 2 evaluates the Connect America Fund (CAF): Phase II and its role in expanding broadband access by exploiting discontinuities in subsidy assignment from the CAF to estimate the effect of subsidies on access. I find subsidies to price cap carriers increased access to 10 Mbps/1 Mbps download-upload speed broadband by 4.25 percentage points, however, this effect is local around the least-costly eligible areas. Furthermore, I show that the technology as well as the number of providers in targeted regions are unaffected by these subsidies. The last chapter uses two databases of private business transactions to estimate valuation ratios and aggregate wealth for the four major components of private business wealth: sole proprietorships, partnerships, S corporations, and private C corporations. We estimate aggregate private business wealth of $13.6 trillion in 2017, significantly more than the Financial Accounts estimates but less than the Survey of Consumer Finance.