Austan Goolsbee and Peter J. K | 01/2006

Standford University Economics - Here’s the verbatim quote from Paul Kedrosky, who has found an academic paper that puts the numbers to what’s obvious to everyone:

Only about 0.2% of consumer spending in the U.S. … went for Internet access in 2004 yet time use data indicates that people spend around 10% of their entire leisure time going online… Based on expenditure and time use data and our elasticity estimate, we calculate that consumer surplus from the Internet may be around 2% of full-income, or several thousand dollars per user.