Replication data for: Wages and the Internet: The Role of Population Size

This paper investigates the relationship between firms' investment and advanced Internet technologies during the 1990s and county-level wage growth. It responds to the \"payoff-puzzle\" identified by Forman et al. (2012), namely that Internet investment disproportionally benefitted counties with high populations, high human capital, high income, and high-tech industries. Counties often display these characteristics in tandem, and reducing the sample to large counties renders the interaction effect insignificant. We therefore ask why large counties experience such differential returns to Internet investment, and discuss potential explanations, including non-quantifiable socio-economic characteristics and measurement error. The primary data used in this study were provided by Forman et al. as a replication dataset on the website of the American Economic Review: http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/aer.102.1.556. We augmented this source with wage and demographic information for the large counties identified in the Current Population Survey between 1995 and 2000. Please see the accompanying codebook and Stata do-file for a complete description of the variables contained in these data.