Regulating Privacy Online: An Economic Evaluation of the GDPR

Modern websites rely on personal data to design better content and to market themselves. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was intended to make access to such personal data more difficult, with the goal of protecting user privacy. We examine the GDPR's impact on website page views and revenue for 1,084 online firms using data from Adobe's website analytics platform. We find a reduction of 12 percent in both EU user website page views and website revenue recorded by the platform after the GDPR’s enforcement deadline. We decompose these GDPR effects into changes in real outcomes and changes to data recording, respectively. (JEL D83, K24, L51, L86, L88, M31, M37)