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.本文考察了20世纪90年代企业投资与先进互联网技术之间的关联，以及县级层面的工资增长情况。本文回应了福尔曼等人（Forman et al., 2012）提出的“回报谜题”——即互联网投资不成比例地惠及人口规模庞大、人力资本充裕、收入水平较高且布局高技术产业的县域。这类县域往往同时具备上述多重特征，而若将样本限定为大县域，则交互效应会变得不显著。据此，本文旨在探究为何大县域的互联网投资回报存在如此显著的差异，并讨论了包括难以量化的社会经济特征与测量误差在内的潜在解释路径。本研究使用的核心数据由福尔曼等人提供，是发布于《美国经济评论》官网的复现数据集，链接为：http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/aer.102.1.556。我们在此基础上，补充了1995年至2000年间当前人口调查（Current Population Survey, CPS）中涉及的大县域的工资与人口统计信息。如需了解上述数据中包含变量的完整说明，请参阅配套的代码簿与Stata do文件。