Home broadband and human capital formation

Using administrative data, we estimate the effect of home broadband speed on student-level value-added test scores. Our headline estimate relies on jumps in connection quality between close neighbours that occur across thousands of invisible telephone exchange station catchment-area boundaries. We find that increasing speed by 1 Mbit/s increases test scores by 1.37 percentile ranks, equivalent to 5% of a standard deviation. School-level factors or broadband take-up cannot explain this. Instead, the positive effects are concentrated among high-ability and non-free-school-meal eligible students and result from more education-oriented internet use. Differences in ICT quality can thus lead to increasing education inequalities.