Scott Wallsten is an economist whose research focuses on telecommunications, regulation, competition, and technology policy. He is currently vice president for research and senior fellow at the Technology Policy Institute as well as a senior policy fellow at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy. He served as economics director of the Federal Communications Commission’s National Broadband Task Force from 2009-2010, and has also been director of communications policy studies and senior fellow at The Progress & Freedom Foundation, a senior fellow at the AEI - Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, an economist at The World Bank, a scholar at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and a staff economist at the U.S. President's Council of Economic Advisers. Wallsten holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University.
Working Papers
What Are We Not Doing When We're Online?, Technology Policy Institute Working Paper (2011)
While Americans are spending an increasing amount of leisure time engaged in online activities, total...
How to Create a More Efficient Broadband Universal Service Program by Incorporating Demand and Cost-Effectiveness Analysis, Technology Policy Institute Working Paper (2011)
The existing high-cost fund suffers from two inherent flaws: it does not incorporate how much...
The Universal Service Fund: What Do High-Cost Subsidies Subsidize?, Technology Policy Institute Working Paper (2011)
The universal service program in the United States currently transfers about $7.5 billion per year...
Residential and Business Broadband Prices Part 2: International Comparisons (with James Riso), Technology Policy Institute Working Paper (2010)
For this project, we assemble a new dataset consisting of more than 25,000 residential and...
Residential and Business Broadband Prices Part 1: An Empirical Analysis of Metering and Other Price Determinants (with James Riso), Technology Policy Institute Working Paper (2010)
For this project, we assemble a new dataset consisting of more than 25,000 residential and...
Articles
What Gets Measured Gets Done: Stop Focusing on Irrelevant Broadband Metrics, Communications of the ACM (2011)
Concerns regarding the state of U.S. broadband arises from a combination of focusing on the...
The Path to Universal Broadband: Why We Should Grant Low-Income Subsidies and Use Experiments and Auctions to Determine the Specifics (with Gregory L. Rosston), The Economists' Voice (2011)
Gregory Rosston of Stanford University and Scott Wallsten of the Technology Policy Institute argue that...
From Network Externalities to Broadband Growth Externalities: a Bridge not yet Built (with John W. Mayo), Review of Industrial Organization (2011)
Quantifying the impact of new technologies on economic activity has proven notoriously difficult. Indeed, it...
The Future of Digital Communications Research and Policy, Federal Communications Law Journal (2010)
Presentations
An Economic Overview of the Implications for Online Video of the Proposed Comcast-NBCU Transaction, FCC Public Hearing (2010)
Testimony on Reforming the Universal Service High Cost Fund, U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Energy and Commerce, Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet (2009)
Testimony for FCC en banc hearing at Carnegie Mellon University on Broadband and the Digital Future, FCC and Carnegie Mellon University (2008)
Testimony on Broadband to Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship (2007)
Popular Press
Contributions to Books
Do Science Parks Generate Regional Economic Growth?, Building High-Tech Clusters: Silicon Valley and Beyond (2004)
Universal(ly Bad) Service: Providing Infrastructure Services to Rural and Poor Urban Consumers (with George RG Clarke), Infrastructure for Poor People: Public Policy for Private Provision (2003)
Until recently, utility services (telecommunications, power, water, and gas) throughout the world were provided by...