Publications

We investigate how subjective and objective assessment of COVID-19 risks affect preferences toward working from home (WFH). We conducted a discrete choice experiment combined with an information provision experiment with more than 11 000 workers in Poland. Estimating willingness to pay for WFH, we find that the subjective assessment of COVID-19 risk matters more than objective occupational exposure. Informing workers about occupational exposure to contagion generally does not affect preferences toward WFH.

We study the age- and gender-specific labour market effects of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and robots in 14 European countries between 2010-2018. Using IV regressions we show that they increased the shares of young and prime-aged women in employment and in the wage bills of particular sectors, but reduced the shares of older women and prime-aged men.

We study implications of automation of routine cognitive work in shared service centres (SSCs) in Poland. Drawing on 31 in-depth interviews, we highlight the negotiated nature of automation processes shaped by interactions between headquarters, SSCs, and their workers. Workers actively participated in automation processes, eliminating the most mundane tasks. This resulted in upskilling, higher job satisfaction and empowerment. Yet, this depends upon the fact that automation is triggered by labour shortages limit the labour-intensive expansion of SSCs.

We study the effects of robot penetration on household income inequality in 14 European countries between 2006–2018. We find that, similarly to the United States, automation reduced relative hourly wages and employment of directly affected European demographic groups. We then use the estimated wage and employment shocks as input to the EUROMOD microsimulation model to assess how robot-driven shocks affected household income inequality. Automation had tiny effects on income inequality. Transfers played a key role in cushioning the transmission of these shocks to household incomes.

This book, edited by Carlos Gradín, Piotr Lewandowski, Simone Schotte, and Kunal Sen, investigates the trends in earnings inequalities in developing countries to determine the main drivers, focusing on structural and occupational changes. It includes a cross-country analysis and country case studies of 11 low- or middle-income countries that have experienced strong transformations. In the cross-country chapter. In the cross-country chapter, Piotr Lewandowski, Albert Park, and Simone Schotte studied the evolution of country-specific routine task intensity for 87 countries that cover 75% of global employment and presented stylized facts on the global divergence in the de-routinisation of jobs. Open-access pdf and the dataset with country-specific routine task intensity of occupations are available.