This paper investigates how privacy regulation affects the structure of online markets. We provide a simple theoretical model capturing the basic trade-off between the degree of privacy intrusion and the informativeness of advertising. We derive empirically testable hypotheses regarding a...

We use traffic data from around 5,000 web domains in Europe and United States to investigate the effect of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on website visits and user behaviour. We document an overall traffic reduction of approximately 15% in the long-run and find...