The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is impacting on the industrialization options for Africa inter alia through three interrelated sets of technologies, namely automation, additive manufacturing and the Industrial Internet. In this paper I set out the case for why Africa should industrialize....

This paper examines the extent to which aggregate-level de-routinization can be attributed to firm-level technology adoption during the most recent technological expansion. We use administrative data and a novel firm survey to distinguish frontier technologies from older technologies. We find...

Using firm-level data covering the 27 EU countries, the UK and the US, we show that employers tend to reduce investment in training per employee after adopting advanced digital technologies (ADT). We estimate with a control function approach firm-level production functions augmented with two...

This paper analyzes the effects of increased shared computer access in secondary schools in Peru. Administrative data are used to identify, through propensity-score matching, two groups of schools with similar observable educational inputs but different intensity in computer access. Extensive...

Computing power continues to grow at an enormous rate. Simultaneously, more and better data is increasingly available and Machine Learning methods have seen significant breakthroughs in the recent past. All this pushes further the boundary of what machines can do. Nowadays increasingly complex...

While numerous studies have analyzed the aggregate employment effects of digital technologies, this paper focuses on the employment development of individual workers exposed to digitalization. We use a unique linked employer-employee data set for Germany and a direct measure of the first-time...

COVID-19 school closure has caused a worldwide shift towards technology-aided home schooling. Given widespread poverty in developing countries, this has raised concerns over new forms of learning inequalities. Using nationwide data on primary and secondary school children in slum and rural...

Can digital labour market platforms reduce search frictions in formal or informal labour markets? We study this question using a randomized experiment embedded in a tracer study of the work transitions of graduates from technical and vocational colleges in Mozambique. We implement an...

The increasing use of online labour platforms as intermediaries for finding work - known as crowdwork or gig work - is a new form of 'hybrid' (solo)self-employment that hinges on the borders of dependent and self-employment. In this study we use a novel international dataset of online platform...