Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, technological change has led to the automation of existing tasks and the creation of new ones, as well as the reallocation of labor across occupations and industries. These processes have been costly to individual workers, but labor demand has...

We modify the concept of the middle-income trap (MIT) against the background of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the (future) challenges of automation (creating the concept of the "MIT 2.0") and discuss the implications for developing Asia. In particular, we analyze the impacts of...

The U.S. economy has experienced a significant drop in the fraction of the population employed in middle wage, "routine task-intensive" occupations. Applying machine learning techniques, we identify characteristics of those who used to be employed in such occupations and show they are now less...

Using the World Bank's Enterprise Survey for the Philippines, our analysis found that, on average, firms that deployed partial or full automation in their operations were more likely to hire more workers than fewer relative to their counterpart firms. These results suggest a net positive...

The U.S. economy has experienced a significant drop in the fraction of the population employed in middle wage, "routine task-intensive" occupations. Applying machine learning techniques, we identify characteristics of those who used to be employed in such occupations and show they are now less...

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, technological change has led to the automation of existing tasks and the creation of new ones, as well as the reallocation of labor across occupations and industries. These processes have been costly to individual workers, but labor demand has...

In this paper we characterize workers’ vulnerability to automation in the near future in Argentina as a function of the exposure to routinization of the tasks that they perform and the potential automation of their occupation. In order to do that we combine (i) indicators of potential...

While economic theory suggests substitutability between labor and capital, little evidence exists regarding the causal effect of labor supply on inventing labor-saving technologies. We analyze the impact of exogenous changes in regional labor supply on automation innovation by exploiting an...

This paper examines recent technological developments and how they could impact efforts by policymakers and political leaders in developing countries to harness trade and investment liberalization to achieve economic development outcomes. It begins by discussing some of the proven elements to...

While economic theory suggests substitutability between labor and capital, little evidence exists regarding the causal effect of labor supply on inventing labor-saving technologies. We analyze the impact of exogenous changes in regional labor supply on automation innovation by exploiting an...

Recent evidence for the U.S. suggests that recessions play a crucial role in promoting automation and the reallocation of productive resources, which in turn increase aggregate productivity and lead to a higher standard of living. I present evidence suggesting that the same is true in Canada. In...

The automation of work tasks due to technological change increases the pressure on employees whose workplaces consist largely of such activities. Further training is an important way of adapting skills and enabling the performance of tasks that cannot be automated and are required in modern...

While economic theory suggests substitutability between labor and capital, little evidence exists regarding the causal effect of labor supply on inventing labor-saving technologies. We analyze the impact of exogenous changes in regional labor supply on automation innovation by exploiting an...

Could robotization make the gender pay gap worse? We provide the first large-scale evidence on the impact of industrial robots on the gender pay gap using data from 20 European countries. We show that robot adoption increases both male and female earnings but also increases the gender pay gap....

We show, theoretically and empirically, that the effects of technological change associated with automation and offshoring on the labor market can substantially deviate from standard neoclassical conclusions when search frictions hinder efficient assortative matching between firms with...

The authors explore the impact of artificial intelligence on the economy by improving the neoclassical production function and the task-based model. Based on the capital accumulation of artificial intelligence and technological progress, they present a theoretical model that explores the effect...

To rationalize a substantial income share of labor despite progressive task automation over the centuries, we present a simple model in which demand moves along a vertically differentiated production structure toward goods of increasing sophistication. Automation of more sophisticated goods...

This book is open access under a CC-BY license. Moral dilemmas are a pervasive feature of working life. Moral Reasoning at Work offers a fresh perspective on how to live with them using ethics and moral psychology research. It argues that decision-makers must go beyond compliance and traditional...

Computing power continues to grow at an enormous rate. Simultaneously, more and better data is increasingly available and Machine Learning methods have seen significant breakthroughs in the recent past. All this pushes further the boundary of what machines can do. Nowadays increasingly complex...

We study the implications of robot adoption at the level of individual firms using a rich panel data-set of Spanish manufacturing firms over a 27-year period (1990-2016). We focus on three central questions: (1) Which firms adopt robots? (2) What are the labor market effects of robot adoption at...

Prettner (2019) studies the implications of automation for economic growth and the labor share in a variant of the Solow-Swan model. The aggregate production function allows for two types of capital, traditional and automation capital. Traditional capital and labor are imperfect substitutes...

We investigate the impact of robot adoption on electoral outcomes in 14 Western European countries, between 1993 and 2016. We employ both official election results at the district level and individual-level voting data, combined with party ideology scores from the Manifesto Project. We measure...

We investigate the impact of robot adoption on electoral outcomes in 14 Western European countries, between 1993 and 2016. We employ both official election results at the district level and individual-level voting data, combined with party ideology scores from the Manifesto Project. We measure...

Will low-skilled workers be replaced by automation? To answer this question, we set up a search and matching model that features two skill types of workers and includes automation capital as an additional production factor. Automation capital is a perfect substitute for low-skilled workers and...

This study follows the Lordan and Neumark (2018) analysis for the US, and examines whether minimum wage increases affect employment opportunities in automatable jobs in the UK for low-skilled low-wage workers. Overall, I find that increasing the minimum wage decreases the share of automatable...

To understand the effects of automation and other types of technological changes on European labor demand, we use a framework and empirical decomposition of observed changes in the total wage bill in the economy developed by Acemoglu and Restrepo (2019). The decomposition is derived from a...

Robots have radically changed the demand for skills and the role of workers in production at an unprecedented pace, with little scope for human capital adjustments. This has affected the job stability and the economic perspectives of large parts of the population in all industrialized countries....

We present a framework for understanding the effects of automation and other types of technological changes on labor demand, and use it to interpret changes in US employment over the recent past. At the center of our framework is the allocation of tasks to capital and labor - the task content of...

We use data from a new international dataset - the European Skills and Jobs Survey - to create a unique measure of skills-displacing technological change (SDT), defined as technological change that may render workers' skills obsolete. We find that 16 percent of adult workers in the EU are...

This paper investigates several channels through which automation affects an emerging economy. Building on a Ricardian model of trade with sectoral linkages and a two-stage production technology, in which robots replace labor in certain tasks, it is shown that domestic and foreign automation...

Forecasts about the effect of new technologies on labor demand are generally pessimistic. However, little is known about the current level of adoption and the effect on labor demand, particularly in developing countries. This paper exploits a recent employer survey in Peru to offer empirical...

This paper documents a positive relationship between labor-friendly institutions and investment in industrial robots in a sample of advanced economies. Institutions explain a substantial proportion of cross-country variation in automation. The relationship between institutions and robots is...

We document a strong negative link between self-employment and the rate of digital adoption by firms in developing and emerging economies. No link between digital adoption and the unemployment rate is found, however. To explain this evidence, we build a general equilibrium search-and-matching...

The education institutions present a complicated economic and social ecosystem with many processes that are constantly under pressure from many stakeholders. Learning organizations are trying to find ways to improve them, but they crash at "unmistakable claims" about the need to build extensive...

The aim of this paper is to examine the potential impacts of automation and digitalisation on the Slovak labour market, which, according to several studies, belongs to a group of countries with the highest risk. To quantify the share of employment at a high risk of automation, we use detailed...

Population aging in advanced economies could have significant macroeconomic implications, unless more individuals choose to participate in labor markets. In this context, the steep increase in the share of older workers who remain economically active since the mid1990s is an overlooked yet...

Social distancing has become worldwide the key public policy to be implemented during the COVID-19 epidemic and reducing the degree of proximity among workers turned out to be an important dimension. An emerging literature looks at the role of automation in supporting the work of humans but the...

We study changes in employment by occupations characterized by different degree of exposure to routinization in the six largest Latin American economies over the last two decades. We combine our own indicators of routine task content based on information from the Programme for the International...

Using a newly collected dataset of robot use at the plant level from 2014 to 2018, we provide the first microscopic portrait of robotisation in Germany and study the potential determinants of robot adoption. Our descriptive analysis uncovers five stylised facts concerning both extensive and,...

Rapid technological progress poses challenges for labor markets. Automation can both displace and create jobs. Currently, an unprecedented digitalization of our economy is underway. Artificial intelligence has become a reality and machines are able to learn how to outperform humans in some...

We propose a model with asymmetric firms where new technologies displace workers. We show that both leading (low-cost) firms and laggard (high-cost) firms increase productivity when automating but that only laggard firms hire more automation-susceptible workers. The reason for this asymmetry is...

Do higher wages lead to more automation innovation? To answer this question, we first use the frequency of certain keywords in patent text to create a new measure of automation innovation in machinery. We show that our measure is correlated with a reduction in routine tasks in a cross-sectoral...