Conference Agenda

The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program represents the largest single federal investment in broadband infrastructure, allocating $42.45 billion to extend connectivity to unserved and underserved locations across the United States. While substantial attention has been paid to the program's coverage objectives and allocation mechanics, comparatively little analysis has examined how the economic impacts of BEAD spending vary depending on which broadband technology is deployed and where. This paper addresses that gap by modeling the regional economic effects of BEAD-funded deployment under alternative technology scenarios using a computable general equilibrium (CGE) framework.

The central research question is: how do the economic multiplier effects of BEAD expenditures differ across technologies, e.g., fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) and low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellite broadband deployment, and how do these differences vary by geographic context? The distinction matters because the two technologies involve fundamentally different supply chains, labor requirements, and patterns of local economic linkage. Fiber deployment is construction-intensive, relying on local labor for trenching, conduit placement, and premises connection, with equipment and materials sourced through a mix of domestic and imported inputs. LEO satellite deployment, by contrast, concentrates capital expenditure in satellite manufacturing and launch operations, with local deployment limited at most to customer premises equipment delivery while potentially bringing connectivity to geographically remote areas that were harder to reach with wireline technologies. The hypothesis is that these structural differences produce meaningfully different local multiplier effects and that the magnitude of this divergence itself varies with the economic characteristics of the deployment region.

The methodology employs a multi-region CGE model calibrated to represent distinct geographic archetypes ranging from remote and sparsely populated areas (e.g., rural Alaska) to environments that dense urban environments (e.g., New York). The model traces BEAD expenditure flows through regional input-output linkages, capturing direct, indirect, and induced effects on output, employment, and income. Sectoral detail is constructed at the NAICS code level to distinguish between the construction, telecommunications, manufacturing, and professional services sectors most directly implicated in broadband deployment. The model is calibrated using publicly available data on BEAD state allocations, operator cost structures for FTTP and LEO deployment, and regional economic accounts from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The paper assesses economic impacts of BEAD spending through general equilibrium modeling, with focus on the channels through which infrastructure economics and telecommunications policy impact regional economic growth. It contributes to a growing literature on the economic impacts of broadband investment but departs from prior work in two respects. First, most existing studies focus on demand-side productivity effects of connectivity. This is important and interesting but such a lens obscures the important differences between the various technologies that facilitate connectivity. This paper instead focuses on the supply-side stimulus channel — the economic activity generated by the deployment process itself — and offers a novel method that allows researchers to weigh the economic impacts of various broadband technologies. Second, by modeling geographic heterogeneity explicitly, the paper moves beyond national average multiplier estimates that may obscure large regional variation in who benefits economically from federal broadband spending.