Publications

Extracting the Costs of International Internet Communication

Working Paper, 2021

A large and increasing share of communication now takes place by Internet, but due to the decentralized nature of the Internet, it is difficult to measure the bilateral costs of Internet communication. In this paper, I develop a model to extract an index of the costs of international Internet communication, based on the model of physical transportation of goods from Allen and Arkolakis (2014). This model enables me to extract these costs using data which is, for the most part, publicly available. I then employ these extracted costs in a gravity model of trade, finding that different economic sectors react heterogeneously to changes in communication costs. Aspects of this heterogeneity in trade of goods resemble results from Keller and Yeaple (2013), while the heterogeneity I observe in trade of services appears to be a novel result.

Routing Data as a Measure of Internet Access

Working Paper, 2019

I propose a pair of new measures of Internet access which can be computed using minimal computational resources, across large geographic areas, from publicly-available data which describe how information is routed across the Internet. These measures can also be computed at relatively fine levels of detail. I then demonstrate empirically that these measures possess similar explanatory power when compared to measures previously used in the literature, and that the two measures capture largely distinct aspects of Internet access.

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