We study the effect of the adoption of automation technologies – industrial robots, and software and databases – on the incidence of atypical employment in 13 EU countries between 2006 and 2018. Industrial robots significantly increase atypical employment share, mostly through involuntary part-time and involuntary fixed-term work. There's no effect of software and databases. Higher trade union density mitigates the robots’ impact on atypical employment, while employment protection legislation plays no role.
We study the relationship between global value chain (GVC) participation, worker-level routine task intensity, and wage inequality within countries. Using survey data from 34 countries and instrumenting for GVC participation, we find that higher GVC participation is associated with more routine-intensive work, especially among workers in offshorable occupations. This indirectly widens within-country wage inequality. However, GVC participation directly contributes to reduced wage inequality, except in the richest countries. Overall, GVC participation is negatively associated with wage inequality in most low- and middle-income countries that receive offshored jobs, and positively in high-income countries that offshore jobs.
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 112, 102264
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.
Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, 70, 422-441
We study the effects of robot exposure on worker flows in 16 European countries between 1998-2017. Overall, we find small negative effects on job separations and small positive effects on job findings. We detect significant cross-country differences and find that labour costs are a major driver: the effects of robot exposure are generally larger in absolute terms in countries with relatively low or average levels of labour costs than in countries with high levels of labour costs.
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 the effects of robot penetration on household income inequality in 14 European countries between 2006–2018. Automation reduced relative hourly wages and employment of directly affected European demographic groups. We 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.
