Suchergebnisse

In February 2018 the EU adopted the Geo-Blocking Regulation that prohibits any attempts to restrict consumer access to e-commerce websites on the basis of their nationality or country of residence. This paper seeks to evaluate the impact of that policy on crossborder e-commerce. We use page view data for about 10k e-commerce websites over the period February 2018 to October 2019, approximately 10 months before and after the entry into force of the regulation in December 2018. We classify the data in cross -border country pair traffic between countries of origin of visitors and countries of establishment of websites. Despite the fact that there may still be a significant amount of delivery restrictions in cross-border trade, we conjecture that any variation in traffic to e-commerce websites will correlate with variations in monetised e-commerce, even if modest. We find that the regulation increased real cross-border e-commerce activity inside the EU from 9.2% to 13%, depending on model specifications. It increased cross-border trade between EU consumers and e-commerce sites anywhere in the world by 11.2% to 11.9%. Applying different criteria for the definition of purely domestic websites slightly weakens the results for intra-EU cross-border trade and gives it a further boost for worldwide cro ss-border trade.

This paper explores the impact of robot adoption on European regional labour markets between 1995 and 2015. Specifically, we look at the effect of the usage of industrial robots on jobs and employment structures across European regions. We regress the outcome of interest on the change in the exposure to robotisation in each regional labour market, based on the initial distribution of employment by industry across regions. Our estimates suggest that the effect of robots on employment tends to be mostly small and negative during the period 1995-2005 and positive during the period 2005-2015 for the overwhelming majority of model specifications and assumptions. Regarding the effects on employment structures, we find some evidence of a mildly polarising effect in the first period, but this finding depends to some extent on the model specifications. In sum, this paper shows that the impact of robots on European labour markets in the last couple of decades has been small and ambiguous. The strength and even the sign of this effect are sensitive to the specifications, as well as to the countries and periods analysed.