The impact of the EU General Data Protection Regulation on innovation in firms

Knut Blind, Crispin Miles Niebel and Christian Rammer

No 22-047, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: In May 2018, a new regulation by the European Commission on data protection came into force, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It requires many firms to update their data protection strategy. It may also complicate different types of data usage, particularly related to data on individuals. In the literature, there is little evidence and no consensus on whether this new privacy regulation is beneficial or detrimental to innovation. This study provides empirical evidence on the impact of the GDPR on innovation activities in firms. Exploiting panel data from the German innovation survey, a difference-in-difference analysis shows that the GDPR stimulated additional innovation activity while shifting the focus of innovation away from radical and towards more incremental innovation. This holds for both firms that report that the GDPR complicated their innovation efforts, and for the much smaller group of firms that report that the GDPR facilitated their innovation activities. Finally, larger and older firms experience higher increases in their turnover with incremental innovation compared to smaller and younger firms.

Keywords: General Data Protection Regulation; Innovation; Community Innovation Survey; Difference-in-difference estimation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C22 L51 O31 O38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent, nep-eur, nep-ino, nep-reg, nep-sbm and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/265420/1/1819824276.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:zewdip:22047

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().