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.
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.
Energy poverty, i.e., inefficient heating and insufficient access to energy services, can turn a shelter into a health hazard. We find that substandard housing and ineffective heating is associated with a higher risk of poor health in an urban context. We surveyed people living in two middle-sized cities in a coal-dependent region of Poland and used objective and subjective indicators of energy poverty and self-assessed health status. We demonstrate that people who live in substandard housing are more likely to exhibit poor musculoskeletal and cardiovascular outcomes, by 10 and 6 pp, respectively than otherwise similar people living in suitable housing conditions. We show that energy-poor people who use coal or a wood stove have a 24 pp higher likelihood of respiratory disease than the energy-poor who live in flats connected to district heating. We also find that a significant amount of the explained variance in the probability of respiratory disease is attributable to energy poverty. To improve the housing conditions and reduce the risk of poor health outcomes, we recommend two policy instruments: 1) a full subsidy for thermal retrofits and connecting multi-family buildings to the district heating network and 2) a targeted energy voucher for clean heating.
We construct survey-based measures of routine task intensity (RTI) of jobs consistent with those based on the U.S. O*NET database for workers in 47 countries. We find substantial cross-country differences in the content of work within occupations. We assess the contribution of technology, supply of skills, globalization, and economic structures to the variation of workers’ RTI across countries. Technology is by far the most important factor. Supply of skills is next in importance, especially for workers in high-skilled occupations, while globalization is more important than skills for workers in low-skilled occupations. Occupational structure explains only about one-fifth of cross-country variation in RTI.
Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 43, 80–98
We study the labour market transition pathways driven by the coal phase-out in Poland between 1990 and 2050. We apply the concept of branching points to describe the coal transition in the context of structural and labour supply changes and educational upgrading. We show that in the 1990s and 2000s, job opportunities for miners were scarce, as the trajectories of these trends deteriorated their labour market prospects. As these trends have reversed in the 2010s, the future employment outlook of the coal phase-out in Poland is more favourable than in the past. Decarbonisation will lead to a surplus of Polish hard coal mining workers from 2030, yet the projected shortages of workers in other sectors will create opportunities for reallocation.
