Research Paper 31: Economic impact of laying submarine cables

This paper provides a comprehensive empirical analysis of the economic impact of submarine cable infrastructure (SMC), which is critical to global digital connectivity and carries almost all intercontinental data traffic. Despite its fundamental role in the digital economy, there is so far very little robust evidence on the economic returns of investment in submarine cables.

To close this gap, we use a panel dataset of developed countries as well as causal identification strategies such as two-way fixed effects models and instrumental variables that exploit exogenous variation from factors such as a country's coastline length and the historical level of competition in the market.