Gregory L. Rosston

Stanford University | SU · Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR)

‘Make America Great Again’ was an economic success, a continuation of the Obama recovery, or a failure based on your point of view, and possibly all three depending on which parts of the Trump economic policy you examine. This chapter explores Trump’s economic policy over his four years in office, asking whether his policies were truly a break from...

Unlocking spectrum from inefficient, inflexible uses assigned mostly prior to the 1990s to a more efficient, flexible-use model is a key challenge for the Federal Communications Commission. This paper focuses on transitions of spectrum use and looks at how the FCC attempted to minimize transaction and holdout costs while also facilitating competiti...

We evaluate a program by a private Internet Service Provider (ISP) intended to encourage low-income households to subscribe to broadband internet service. As part of its approval of the Comcast-NBCU merger in 2011, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) mandated a “voluntary commitment” by Comcast to introduce a low-income broadband program th...

We estimate a two-step control-function model that relates incumbent prices for small-business telecommunications services to the number of facilities-based entrants, cost, demand, regulatory conditions, and a correction for endogenous market structure. Results show that the price effects from entry are understated in ordinary least squares regress...

Entrepreneurs hoping for aggressive growth in space markets cite the commercialization of the Internet as a golden age of market dynamism and enlightened regulation. This study investigates the growth of commercial computing, a business-oriented Internet, and spectrum allocation as historical analogs guiding new space policy. These "digital analogs...

The Federal Communications Commission can improve the transparency of its decision process by establishing a set of guidelines for its review of mergers. Its current process is opaque, and parties cannot discern the weights that it places on “public interest” goals in some areas and how those balance against harms in other areas. The antitrust agen...

This policy study uses U.S. Census microdata to evaluate how subsidies for universal telephone service vary in their impact across low-income racial groups, gender, age, and home ownership. Our demand specification includes both the subsidized monthly price (Lifeline program) and the subsidized initial connection price (Linkup program) for local te...

Over the past 80 years, the Federal Communications Commission has been responsible for the allocation of non-governmental use of the radio frequency spectrum. Over that time, here have been significant changes in spectrum use that have been driven by changes in demand and technology. The technical, regulatory, and business obstacles in past realloc...

This paper empirically examines the effects of network unbundling on retail prices in U.S. local telephone markets. Panel data for 7,604 wire centers in 43 states from 1996 to 2002 are used to estimate the price effects from the unbundling and entry-promoting conditions of the Telecommunications Act. Results show that Section 271 led to the rebalan...

The FCC has taken three different competition policy approaches: the classic role of regulating terms and conditions of sale, the modern role of using various tools to create largely deregulated, multi-firm, competitive markets, and the laissez-faire approach of believing that unregulated markets, even if monopolized, will produce the best outcome....

Reallocating valuable wireless spectrum can generate billions of dollars in revenue to the U.S. federal government while also benefiting consumers.

Major changes in technology and in regulation led to the proliferation of and willingness to pay for new communication services The changes in technology enabled the changes in regulation, both through the ability to increase supply and quality, but because technological change opened the marketplace to new interest groups influencing regulators an...

Spectrum auctions are used by governments to assign and price licenses for wireless communications. Effective auction design recognizes the importance of competition, not only in the auction but also in the downstream market for wireless communications. This paper examines several instruments that regulators can use to enhance competition and there...

A comprehensive data set on local telephone service prices is used to evaluate the effect of Lifeline and Linkup programs on the telephone penetration rates of low-income households in the United States. Lifeline and Linkup programs respectively subsidize the monthly subscription and initial installation charges of eligible low-income households. T...

Gregory Rosston of Stanford University and Scott Wallsten of the Technology Policy Institute argue that the switch from voice to broadband services provides a rare opportunity to reform universal service programs. Rossten and Wallsten offer an alternative design to deliver services in an efficient and politically-palatable manner.

As part of the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) National Broadband Report to Congress, we have been asked to conduct a survey to help determine consumer valuations of different aspects of broadband Internet service. This report details our methodology, sample and preliminary results. We do not provide policy recommendations.This draft repo...

This paper uses data from a nationwide survey administered during late 2009 and early 2010 to estimate a random utility model of household preferences for broadband Internet service. Reliability and speed are important service characteristics: the representative household is willing to pay $20 per month for more reliable service; $45 for an improve...

Spectrum auctions are used by governments to assign and price licenses for wireless communications. Effective auction design recognizes the importance of competition, not only in the auction, but in the downstream market for wireless communications. This paper examines several instruments regulators can use to enhance competition and thereby improv...

The ongoing debate about possible implementation of regulatory rules requiring “network neutrality” for wireless telecommunications services is inherently about whether to impose prohibitions on the ability of network operators to control their vertical relationships. Antitrust analysis is well suited to analyze whether a wireless network neutralit...

While auctions are only a part of spectrum policy and wireless services are only part of the overall competitive landscape for telecommunications services, wireless has become a large and rapidly growing part of telecommunications around the world. There continues to be interest in auction design today, as the FCC and many of its counterparts aroun...

The signatories to this document are economists who have studied telecommunications, auctions, and competition policy. While we may disagree about the stimulus package, we believe that it is important to implement mechanisms that make stimulus spending as efficient as possible. To that end, we have come together to encourage the National Telecommun...

The Internet is transforming communications around the world, even with the downturn in the technology market that we saw at the start of this century. This transformation permeates all forms of communications, but its success at realizing maximum consumer benefits depends, at least in part, on the flexibility of communications regulation. Regulati...

While Internet usage blossomed during the entire 1995–2001 time period, there was a large change in the nature of the high-speed Internet access business. Initially, connection, routing and content were three separate parts of high-speed Internet service. Cable companies initially teamed with affiliated third-party providers to create their high-sp...

This paper examines how regulators behave in markets when there is a tension between retail competition and cross subsidy. Using retail and wholesale prices from regional Bell operating company territories and price-cost margins as a proxy for political influence, we find that private interests influence the structure of retail prices, especially f...

While Internet usage blossomed during the entire 1995-2001 time period, there was a large change in the nature of the high-speed Internet access business. Initially, connection, routing and content were three separate parts of high-speed Internet service. Cable companies initially teamed with affiliated third-party providers to create their high-sp...

In this statement, a group of economists assembled by the AEI-Brookings Joint Center makes the following two recommendations to improve the competitive provision of broadband services. First, Congress should eliminate local franchising regulations, which serve as a barrier to new entry. Second, Congress and the Federal Communications Commission sho...

This paper examines how regulators set local prices in response to the changes brought on by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (“Telecom Act”). We are particularly interested in the extent to which state regulators set prices that promoted efficiency or were influenced by private-interest groups who had secured rents under a regime of regulated mo...

This paper studies how the political influence of consumer groups and firms affects the behavior of state regulators and in turn the effectiveness of federal policies. We employ a unique granular data set for U.S. local telephone markets to examine empirically differences in state and intrastate characteristics that identify regulators' pricing dec...

This paper studies how the political influence of consumer groups and firms affects the behavior of state regulators and in turn the effectiveness of federal policies. We employ a unique granular data set for U.S. local telephone markets to examine empirically differences in state and intrastate characteristics that identify regulators’ pricing dec...

This paper examines how the structure of local telephone rates has changed in the four years following passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Data on local rates as they stood at the end of 1995 and in 2000 for the Bell Operating Companies in 45 states and the District of Columbia and estimates of wire-center-level costs from the Federal Co...

This paper shows through several case studies that the Federal Communications Commission is having a difficult time moving toward more reliance on market forces. The case studies highlight the problems with a case-by-case approach to spectrum management rather than a wholesale change in policy. The paper then proposes a concrete method for moving t...

High-speed or "broadband" Internet access currently is provided, at the local level, chiefly by cable television and telephone companies, often in competition with each other. Wireless and satellite providers have a small but growing share of this business. An influential coalition of economic interests and academics have proposed that local broadb...

In May 2002, the Supreme Court upheld the rules promulgated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to implement provisions in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (the Act) regarding mandatory resale of the components of local telephone networks. This article explains the background of the forward-looking pricing rules adopted by the FCC, the...

Filed February 7, 2001 as a Comment in the Federal Communications Commission's "Secondary Markets" rule making, 37 prominent economists in regulation and telecommunications policy urge dramatic liberalization of spectrum policy. The statement calls for eliminating restrictions on wireless licenses for new and existing users, giving competitors wide...

The introduction of competition forces regulators to address the historical practice of using of implicit cross subsidies to maintain uniformly low local telephone service rates. The Federal Communications Commission recently adopted rules to remove a portion of these implicit subsidies by adopting an explicit universal service program. This progra...

After a long period of awarding spectrum licenses inefficiently, changes in the budget and budgetary process coupled with increases in the value of the spectrum for non-broadcast use led Congress to allow the Federal Communications Commission to award licenses through competitive bidding. Contrary to the perceived view of government bureaucracies a...

Widespread deployment of broadband technology may well be the next wave of the computer and communications revolutions. No one knows what technology, business plan, marketing idea, or combination of such ideas will best serve customers or succeed in the marketplace. As a result, government policy should not favor or disfavor any type of plan to pro...

PCS licensees have the flexibility to provide services that are most valuable to consumers in the same way that companies throughout our economy provide services that consumers demand. This is a sea change in FCC policy and it should be continued. Spectrum flexibility contains two primary components, service flexibility and technical flexibility. W...

This paper suggests that the imminent introduction of new local access competition using existing and new technologies should end any possibility of a natural monopoly in local exchange. The paper questions whether the fundamental economics of the local exchange really require regulation of local telephone service rather than the narrow regulation...

Policy Statements, Rules, and Wireless Carterfone"Frieden: "Hold The Phone: Assessing the Rights of Wireless Handset Owners and the Network Neutrality Obligations of Carriers"Rosston: "Carterfone and the Wireless World – Is There Enough Competition?"