How do firms respond to technological advances that facilitate the automation of tasks? Which tasks will they automate, and what types of worker will be replaced as a result? We present a model that distinguishes between a task's engineering complexity and its training requirements. When two...

We offer an integrated explanation and empirical analysis of the polarization of U.S. employment and wages between 1980 and 2005, and the concurrent growth of low skill service occupations. We attribute polarization to the interaction between consumer preferences, which favor variety over...

Using the entire population of USPTO patent applications published between 2002 and 2019, and leveraging on both patent classification and semantic analysis, this paper aims to map the current knowledge base centred on robotics and AI technologies. These technologies are investigated both as a...

This paper represents one of the first attempts at building a direct measure of occupational exposure to robotic labour-saving technologies. After identifying robotic and LS robotic patents retrieved by Montobbio et al. (2022), the underlying 4-digit CPC definitions are employed in order to...

This paper analyzes the interplay between the allocation of authority within firms and workers' exposure to automation risk. We propose an evolutionary model to study the complementary fit of job design and workplace governance as resulting from the adoption of worker voice institutions, in...

This study identifies the job attributes, and in particular skills and abilities, which predict the likelihood a job is recently automatable drawing on the Josten and Lordan (2020) classification of automatability, EU labour force survey data and a machine learning regression approach. We find...

How do truck drivers perceive the risk they face from automation and their opportunities to retrain for employment in a different occupation? Autonomous vehicle (AV) technology has made rapid progress in recent years, so these questions are likely salient to truckers. Based on surveys of the new...

This paper studies the impact of robot adoption on firms' global sourcing activities. Using a rich panel dataset of Spanish manufacturing firms, we show that robot adopting firms increased their intermediate input purchases from foreign and domestic suppliers between 2006 and 2016. The effects...

This study follows the Lordan and Neumark (2018) analysis for the US, and examines whether minimum wage increases affect employment opportunities in automatable jobs in the UK for low-skilled low-wage workers. Overall, I find that increasing the minimum wage decreases the share of automatable...

While economic theory suggests substitutability between labor and capital, little evidence exists regarding the causal effect of labor supply on inventing labor-saving technologies. We analyze the impact of exogenous changes in regional labor supply on automation innovation by exploiting an...