Worried about being left behind in the Digital Age, a few hundred municipalities have chosen to construct and operate high-speed Internet networks. Above all else, it is the impacts on the labor market—i.e., the promise of “more jobs”—that form the policy justification for these...

In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of government spending on private-sector job growth. Rather than contemplate the average or typical effect of government stimulus on private-sector jobs, we divide the past fifty years of U.S. economic history into low-growth and high-growth periods....