James Prieger – Entrepreneurship in Minority Areas: The Roles of Broadband Availability and Financial Constraints

Wednesday, January 22nd, 2020

12:30 pm - 1:50 pm, ASC 236

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Join us on Wednesday, January 22nd at 12:30 in ASC 236 for James Prieger’s talk about “Entrepreneurship in Minority Areas: The Roles of Broadband Availability and Financial Constraints”

This empirical study uses a panel dataset to investigate the links among entrepreneurship, broadband, and local financial markets in focusing on minority areas. This topic is of particular value to policymakers because entrepreneurship is crucial for economic growth. I, therefore, examine how broadband infrastructure (internet connectivity) and local financial markets affect the establishment of new businesses in the United States. The results show that broadband infrastructure facilitates entrepreneurship, both across the nation and in areas with a high proportion of minorities. The supply of local financial capital, as measured by banks per capita, also leads to more new establishments. That association is stronger in areas with many black residents and much weaker in Hispanic areas. Broadband moderates the impact of access to local banks; greater broadband availability in an area lessens the importance of local banking availability in facilitating new business formation. These results may help policymakers further understand the importance of local broadband infrastructure and which regional factors facilitate entrepreneurship.

About James Prieger: 

James E. Prieger is an economist specializing in regulatory economics, industrial organization, economics of illicit markets, and applied econometrics. He is a Professor at the Pepperdine University School of Public Policy. Previously, he was an assistant professor of economics at the University of California, Davis. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Prieger has written for scholarly journals on a diverse array of policy topics such as the impact of telecommunications regulation on innovation; broadband deployment and the digital divide; the impact of the broadband provisions of ARRA (the 2009 stimulus bill); whether cell phone use causes traffic accidents; the impact of the Americans with Disabilities Act on retail firms; applications barriers to entry in network markets; entrepreneurship, R&D, and economic growth; and the determinants of civic engagement. His research in the area of econometrics has dealt with techniques for non-randomly sampled duration data and conditional moment tests.

His current research includes investigation of tobacco taxation, black market cigarettes, and other unintended consequences of regulation. In other current work, Prieger examines the role of broadband, transportation, and intellectual infrastructure and how they interact to spur entrepreneurship in the U.S. economy.

Prieger sits on the editorial boards of Applied Economics Quarterly and the International Journal of Business Environment, and his own research has been published in Review of Economics and StatisticsEconomic Inquiry, Journal of Applied EconometricsJournal of Regulatory Economics, and many other journals. Prieger spent a year in 2008-2009 as Senior Economist with the Federal Communications Commission, advising on broadband and telecom merger policy.  He has consulted for major telecommunications and other companies on regulatory issues and presented at panels convened by the FCC.

Lunch will be served. For any questions, email stabesh@usc.edu.