928 SOEPpapers - Does Broadband Internet Affect Fertility?

Email: luca.stella@unibocconi.it 1 1 Introduction The rapid diffusion of the Internet, and in particular of high-speed, broadband Internet, has characterized the digital revolution that has modified lives at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century. [...] First, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to comprehensively assess the impact of broadband Internet on women and men of all ages. [...] Second, the Internet may affect the transition to marriage, and more generally the likelihood of finding a partner who is going to become the parent of a joint child (Rosenfeld and Thomas, 2012). [...] However, the net impact on marriages, and the total indirect impact on fertility, may be ambiguous as the larger pool may at the same time increase the likelihood of match as well as increase the desired reservation quality of the searcher with respect to potential partners. [...] However, this concern is mitigated by the fact that we rely on an instrument that pre-dates the fertility behavior under study and that we exploit the longitudinal dimension of the data to analyze the impact of DSL availability on subsequent fertility outcomes over the period 2008-2012.