Make Money Surfing the Web? The Impact of Internet Use on the Earnings of U.S. Workers
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7258015 |
|---|---|
| Authors | P Dimaggio (0000-0001-5330-2529, Princeton University), B Bonikowski (0000-0003-0107-0644, Princeton University) |
| Year | 2008 |
| Volume | 73 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 227-250 |
| Publication date | 2008-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Sociological Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0003-1224 • E-ISSN: 1939-8271 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/000312240807300203 |
| OpenAlex | W2161655480 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 121 |
| References cited | 48 |
Much research on the “digital divide” presumes that adults who do not use the Internet are economically disadvantaged, yet little research has tested this premise. After discussing several mechanisms that might produce differences in earnings growth between workers who do and do not use the Internet, we use data from the Current Population Survey to examine the impact of Internet use on changes in earnings over 13-month intervals at the end of the “Internet boom.” Our analyses reveal robustly significant positive associations between Web use and earnings growth, indicating that some skills and behaviors associated with Internet use were rewarded by the labor market. Consistent with human-capital theory, current use at work had the strongest effect on earnings. In contrast to economic theory (which has led economists to focus exclusively on effects of contemporaneous workplace technology use), workers who used the Internet only at home also did better, suggesting that users may have benefited from superior access to job information or from signaling effects of using a fashionable technology. The positive association between computer use and earnings appears to reflect the effect of Internet use, rather than use of computers for offline tasks. These results suggest that inequality in access to and mastery of technology is a valid concern for students of social stratification
Business · Demographic economics · Digital divide · Disadvantaged · Earnings · Economic growth · Economics · Human capital · Labour economics · Premise · The Internet · Finance · ICT Impact and Policies · Labor market dynamics and wage inequality · Taxation and Compliance Studies
Soziologie des Digitalen - Digitale Soziologie?
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The Third-Level Digital Divide
The Internet and Local Wages
The Pipeline of Online Participation Inequalities
Policing the Digital Divide
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The Meritocracy Trap Revisited
Whom Does Remote Work Make Happy? The Digital Divide in Remote Workers’ Well-Being
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Wealth, digital overuse, and the changing landscape of digital inequality
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The impact of regional ICT development on job quality of the employee in China
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The impact of internet use on the perceptions of class boundaries and life trajectories
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Circuits of Labour
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Ethnic Differences in Internet Access
The contemporary US digital divide
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AI Skill Demand and Employment Stratification in Copyright-Intensive Information Industries
Social Class, Gender, and Contemporary Parenting Standards in the United States
Workplace computerization and inequality in schedule control
The cultural environment
The diffusion of the Internet
From Bytes to Bodies
Natural language processing for social science research
Measuring users’ internet skills
Internet Use and Subjective Well-Being of the Elderly
Internet Use and Lower Life Satisfaction
The politics of possibility in just transitions
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Obwody pracy
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How Does Internet Infrastructure Construction Affect the Urban–Rural Income Gap? Evidence from a Quasi-Natural Experiment in China
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Inégalités sociales, dispositions et usages du numérique
Female leadership, internet use, and performance of agricultural cooperatives in Vietnam
Internet use and income gaps between rural and urban residents in China
Digital use as a mechanism to accrue economic capital
Can digital skills raise occupational prestige among ethnic minorities
Downloading inclusion
First-level fundamentals
From Use to Overuse
Digital Adaptability
Les japonais en ligne
How Internet usage contributes to livelihood resilience of migrant peasant workers? Evidence from China
What do computers really do? Computerization, fading pay-setting institutions and rising wage inequality
Is the wage premium on using computers at work gender-specific
Does Internet use help reduce rural cropland abandonment? Evidence from China
Does the “Do-It-Yourself Approach” Reduce Digital Inequality? Evidence of Self-Learning of Digital Skills
Social media as a place to see and be seen
Moving on up in the information society? A longitudinal analysis of the relationship between Internet use and social class mobility in Britain
Effects of digital use on trust in political institutions among ethnic minority and hegemonic group – A case study
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Structural change and digitalization in developing countries
Online digital Radion apps usages in Israel
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Digital Distinction
Digital Na(t)ives? Variation in Internet Skills and Uses among Members of the “Net Generation”
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No Kid Is an Island
The Deepening Divide
The New Division of Labor
Technology and Social Inclusion
Workers, Wages, and Technology
The Returns to Computer Use Revisited
How Computers Have Changed the Wage Structure
Bridging the Racial Divide on the Internet
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Internet Connectedness and Inequality
The Skill Content of Recent Technological Change
Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education
Technical Change, Inequality, and the Labor Market
The Forms of Capital
Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination
Durable Inequality
Social Capital
From Counterculture to Cyberculture
Die Internet-Galaxie
Internet Self-Efficacy and the Psychology of the Digital Divide
Welfare to Web to Work
Remarks on the analysis of causal relationships in population research
Gender and the Internet
Paradoxes of Public Sector Customer Service
The Geographies of Online Job Search
Wiring the Labor Market
Human Capital vs. Signalling Explanations of Wages
Upstairs, Downstairs
Finding a Job in the Internet Age
Identities, Boundaries and Social Ties
The Estimation of Causal Effects From Observational Data
Skill-Biased Technological Change and Wage Inequality
| Unique citing works | 121 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 7,12 |
| Citation span | 2009 - 2026 (18) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | Yes |
| Citation types | Neutral: 119 |