Should there be Rage against the Machine? Testing the Routinisation Hypothesis with Individual Level Data

The objective of this paper is to analyse the impact of routine on jobs using the European Working Condition Survey dataset. Statistics indicate that the share of routine jobs decreased between 2000 and 2010, from 49% to 43% of total jobs, consistently with the task-biased technological change theory by Autor et al. (2003). Yet, it is unlikely that the process consists of pure destruction: routine may affect workers also by hitting on wages either because they are not as productive and efficient as a robot would be, or because they share the dividend of their productivity with the owner of the technology. Results of the ordered logit estimation indicate that not only routine tasks are associated to a wage penalty, but also that in half of Western European countries this penalty increases over the decade. Results are robust to the definition of routine adopted