Digital economic activity and resilience for metros and small businesses during Covid-19

The Covid-19 pandemic had an unequal impact across businesses and communities and rapidly accelerated digital trends in the economy. What role, then, did website use play in community resilience and small business outcomes? This article examines a new source of population data on domain name hosts to provide a unique measure of digital economic activity within communities. Seventy-five percent are commercial, including online-only, brick-and-mortar, small, and microbusinesses. With geolocated data on 20 million US domain name hosts, we investigate how their density (per 100 people) affected economic outcomes in the nation's largest metros during the pandemic. Using monthly time series data for the 50 largest metropolitan areas, the domain host data is merged with the US Census Small Business Pulse Surveys and Chetty et al.'s Opportunity Insights data. Results indicate metros with higher concentrations of businesses with an online presence experienced more positive economic perceptions and outcomes from April to December 2020. This high-frequency, granular data on digital economic activity suggests that digitally enabled small and microbusinesses played an important role in local economic resilience and demonstrates how commercial data can be used to generate new insights in a fast-changing environment. Plain English Summary New data show websites were a resource for small business and community resilience in Covid-19. While some studies have shown how digital technologies helped businesses during the pandemic, little research has examined how website use during this time affected communities and their small businesses. Data on the number of domain name hosts (per 100 people) provides a measure of the prevalence of website use in a community. Seventy-five percent of these domain name sites are commercial, primarily small, and microbusinesses. We examine economic outcomes for the 50 largest metros from April to December 2020, including credit and debit card spending, small business revenues and openings, and the perceptions of small business owners. With monthly data and across multiple measures, we find that this digital economic activity positively affected the resilience of communities and small businesses. These findings suggest that policies for an inclusive and effective recovery should consider support for digital skills and effective website use for small and microbusinesses.