journal articles

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. Robots do not affect the total employment rate but significantly increase the involuntary atypical employment share, mainly through fixed-term work. Software and databases increase total employment and are neutral for atypical employment. Higher trade union density mitigates the robots’ impact on atypical employment, while employment protection legislation plays no role.

Using Polish household survey data, we show that cigarette tax hikes reduce smoking more among less-educated populations, who are more sensitive to affordability changes. By 2027, the planned excise increase is projected to lower smoking by 250,000 people, cut consumption by 8.4%, and raise revenues by 10.9%.

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.

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.