Industrial policies are widespread, but evidence on their workforce effects remains limited. We present novel evidence on the impact of EU technology subsidies on employment and skill demand in Finnish SMEs, 1994-2018. The subsidies fund new machinery, including robots and CNC machines....

Technological change, an overwhelming fact in recent socioeconomic history, involves, as Joseph A. Schumpeter famously put it, "creative destruction" on a large scale: it gives rise to new goods, production methods, firms, organisations, and jobs, while rendering some received ones obsolete. Its...

Both the demand for skilled labor and the skill wage premium have become increasingly dispersed across the United States. This paper examines how technological change within occupations drives these uneven local developments. Combining a novel measure of technological change-capturing shifts in...

The global shift toward digital transformation presents both opportunities and challenges for national economies, particularly in terms of workforce readiness. While many studies assess digital readiness via infrastructure or technological adoption, fewer investigate the preparedness of...

In this paper, we evaluate the potential of digitalisation to drive structural transformations toward a sustainable economy. We apply an index decomposition analysis (IDA) to understand the factors influencing energy demand in a panel of 31 high-income countries from 1971 to 2019. The IDA...

Using the second wave of the European Skills and Jobs survey, this paper measures the relationship between technological change that automates or augments workers’ job tasks and their participation in work-related training. We find that 58 per cent of European employees experienced no change...

This paper characterizes the short- and long-run Cournot equilibrium with heterogeneous firms and stochastic technological change. In our model, firms have different technologies with heterogeneous fixed and variable costs and various degrees of markups. In a framework with homogeneous firms,...

In this article, we examine how technology is associated with self-employment dynamics using worker-level data from 30 European countries. We find that, while employees exposed to labour-augmenting technologies are more likely to move from paid employment to solo self-employment and vice-versa,...

This article presents an estimation of a stochastic frontier model using a translogarithmic production function to identify the impact of production factors - labor and capital - along with CO2 emissions and technical progress on the value added of the manufacturing sector in North American...

After growing substantially during the 1980s through the early 2000s, the college wage premium more recently has been largely unchanged, or stagnant. We extend the canonical production-function model of skill premiums to assess supply and demand contributions to the slowdown in the college wage...

Generative AI (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) are moving into domains once seen as uniquely human—reasoning, synthesis, abstraction, and rhetoric. Addressed to labor economists and informed readers, this paper clarifies what is truly new about LLMs, what is not, and why it matters....

Who will gain and who will lose as AI automates tasks? While much of the discourse focuses on job displacement, we show that job transformation - a shift in the task content of jobs - creates large and heterogeneous earnings effects. We develop a quantitative, task-based model where occupations...

Generative AI (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) are moving into domains once seen as uniquely human: reasoning, synthesis, abstraction, and rhetoric. Addressed to labor economists and informed readers, this paper clarifies what is truly new about LLMs, what is not, and why it matters....

How do firms and workers adjust to trade and technology shocks? We analyze two mechanisms that have received little attention: training that upgrades skills and early retirement that shifts adjustment costs to public pension systems. We combine novel data on training participation and early...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to reshape labor markets, yet causal evidence remains scarce. We exploit a novel Swedish subsidy program that encouraged small and mid-sized firms to adopt AI. Using a synthetic difference-in-differences design comparing awarded and non-awarded firms, we...

We provide experimental evidence on how employers adjust expectations to automation risk in high-skill, white-collar work. Using a randomized information intervention among tax advisors in Germany, we show that firms systematically underestimate automatability. Information provision raises risk...

How do firms and workers adjust to trade and technology shocks? We analyze two mechanisms that have received little attention: training that upgrades skills and early retirement that shifts adjustment costs to public pension systems. We combine novel data on training participation and early...

Does educational content respond to technological advances, enabling workers to acquire new expertise? We study how digital technology transforms skill acquisition and impacts workers' careers. We construct a novel database of legally binding vocational training curricula in Germany over 5...

We provide experimental evidence on how employers adjust expectations to automation risk in high-skill, white-collar work. Using a randomized information intervention among tax advisors in Germany, we show that firms systematically underestimate automatability. Information provision raises risk...

We provide experimental evidence on how employers adjust expectations to automation risk in high-skill, white-collar work. Using a randomized information intervention among tax advisors in Germany, we show that firms systematically underestimate automatability. Information provision raises risk...

We examine how gender-based occupational sorting before the release of ChatGPT relates to predicted exposure to generative AI and its potential implications for the gender wage gap. Using Swedish administrative data, we find that women are overrepresented in occupations predicted to be more...

Using a large German firm survey, I randomize information on documented AI productivity gains and industry adoption rates and track firms over time. Beliefs about AI’s productivity potential rise significantly after the treatments across the prior distribution without reducing uncertainty....