Together with Anita Thonipara and Till Proeger from the University of Göttingen, Rolf Sternberg and Lukas Haefner shed light on new aspects of the digital divide between rural and urban regions in Germany. The paper "Digital divide, craft firms' websites and urban-rural disparities-empirical evidence from a web-scraping approach" addresses the question of how widespread digital technologies are in firms and how regional differences in usage intensity can be explained.
Using a web-scraping method, the authors are able to harness data from the Yellow Pages on the prevalence of simple digital applications in around 345,000 small businesses in Germany. From the data obtained, they develop a new indicator for measuring the degree of digitization at the county level. The analysis shows that companies in urban regions are almost twice as likely to operate a website compared to companies in rural regions. This is interpreted as a clear sign of a digital divide between rural and urban regions. At the county level, a high population density, a low average age and a high level of education show a positive and significant correlation with the likelihood of a company operating a website. No regional differences are found, however, in the timeliness of the website and the prevalence of social media among companies.
