This thesis studies how digital technologies reshaped the economy. Chapter A provides an overview of how research on the digital economy has evolved over time, while Chapters B and C analyze the impact of digitization on the creative industries. This thesis employs empirical analyses, drawing on large panel data from online platforms. Quasi-natural experiments and (staggered) difference-in-differences identification strategies are applied to identify causal relationships.
Chapter A is a meta-study that empirically analyzes “The Evolution of Research on the Digital Economy.” The analysis highlights the transformative role of digital technologies in reshaping academic thinking across multiple disciplines. I apply natural language processing and topic modeling techniques to uncover thematic shifts over time. As the field matured, it transitioned from theoretical exploration to empirical validation and application. Moreover, the research community has become more globally dispersed yet increasingly interconnected, underscoring the collaborative nature of scholarship in a digitized world.
Chapter B explores how digital technologies transformed the creative industries, specifically the relationship between physical and digital sales channels in the music industry. In the paper “Get Rich or Die Tryin': Concerts and the Digitization of Recorded Music” (co-authored with Christian Peukert), we study how the digitization of recorded music has affected the income artists derive from concerts. Canceled concerts provide a quasi-experimental setting that allows us to causally estimate the extent to which concert attendance affects recorded music consumption. Our findings suggest that attending concerts significantly boosts the demand for recorded music and is positively correlated with artists' chances of reaching the Spotify charts. Additionally, our results show that income differences between popular and less popular artists are primarily driven by disparities in concert revenue.
Chapter C focuses on the role of intellectual property (IP) rights in the creative industries. The study “Batman Forever? The Role of Trademarks for Reuse in the US Comics Industry” (co-authored with Alexander Cuntz and Christian Peukert) was published in Research Policy in 2023. In this research, we analyze how IP rights, specifically trademarks, affect the reuse of creative works in the comics industry. We find a significant negative relationship between trademarking and reuse, a trend particularly pronounced since the advent of digital technologies. Further, our results show that the reduction in reuse is primarily driven by third parties, while reuse increases when trademark owners license comic characters to third parties.