There are no official statistics on international online trade in goods so far. This paper uses a consumer survey to construct a unique matrix of online B2C domestic and cross-border trade in goods between the 27 EU Member States. We compare online and offline trade patterns for similar goods....

The goal of this paper is to analyze the behaviour of digital music consumers on the Internet. Using clickstream data on a panel of more than 16,000 European consumers, we estimate the effects of illegal downloading and legal streaming on the legal purchases of digital music. Our results suggest...

This paper presents a non-technical summary of the latest economic research studies on cross-border e-commerce in the EU and elsewhere, and combines this with findings from older research on this subject. It compares online with offline cross-border trade and investigates the differences in...

This paper examines whether there is a digital divide in the use of the internet in general and for specific purposes (leisure, improving human capital and obtaining goods and services). It uses a unique dataset which covers the entire clickstream of almost 20,000 internet users in the five...

An important EU Digital Single Market policy objective is to achieve an open and integrated market for online e-commerce in the EU, to make it easy for consumers to go outside their domestic market and shop online in other EU Member States. This study applies a standard gravity model of...

This paper investigates price differences between online and offline retail channels in the EU Digital Single Market. Using price and sales data for ten different product categories sold both offline and online in 21 EU countries in 2009, and correcting for product characteristics, we find...

The objective of this paper is to document the evolution of cross-border music trade patterns in this transition period and to explain what drives digital music trade patterns. The shift from analogue to digital music distribution has substantially reduced trade costs and has enlarged the choice...

Several studies have examined the market value of paid-for internet services and internet access. This paper estimates the value of leisure time spent online for which the consumer pays no monetary price and which has become increasingly important as a leisure activity. We apply a methodology...

It is often assumed that consumers benefit from the internet because it offers a “long tail” with more variety of products to choose from. However, search costs may block the long tail effect and result in the dominance of superstars. This paper examines the variety hypothesis in the entire...

We use data on cross-border e-commerce between EU Member States to estimate the implied cross-border trade cost reduction when consumers move from offline to online consumption. We plug this trade cost estimate into a macro-sector multi-country CGE model to estimate the impact of online...