We study workers’ and employers’ preferences for remote work, estimating the willingness to pay for it using discrete choice experiments with more than 10,000 workers and more than 1,500 employers in Poland. Both workers and employers prefer hybrid over fully-remote work. However, only 25-35% of employers – those with positive views on remote work productivity and high-quality talent management – value remote work costs in line with workers’ willingness to pay, particularly in non-routine cognitive occupations.
We study implications of automating 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 that limit the labour-intensive expansion of SSCs.
Using a tailored, quantitative survey in Poland, we study taxi and delivery platform drivers' working conditions and job quality. Migrants' job quality is noticeably lower regarding contractual terms of employment, working hours, work–life balance, multidimensional deprivation and job satisfaction. Migrants who started a platform job immediately after arriving in Poland, usually as taxi drivers, are particularly deprived.
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.
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.
