Big data firms and information privacy

Our paper combines theories and information from both finance and law disciplines in an original way in terms of business related and geographical interconnections in the world of data protection. The increasing privacy needs of the last decade generated challenges for big data firms, while at the same time opportunities to grow came from emerging technology-linked products and services. What we attempt to test in our research is the connectivity between the performances of big data firms within the limitations of the existing information privacy law. We have worked on a sample of 1,040 listed big data firms from the domain of IT services, active in the market from 2010 until 2018. The geographic spread of our research sample was Asia, Europe and Americas, whereas in the legislation considered relates to the USA-SWISS Privacy Shield, the USA-EU Privacy Shield and the General Data Protection Regulation. The analysis shows that the respective regulations in place have a strong impact for big data firms, especially for IT firms. Methodology wise we have used abnormal returns analysis of the firms’ performance when each regulation came into effect.