New processes significantly affect firms and workers; however, due to a lack of quantitative indicators, our understanding of the measures, determinants, and impacts of new processes remains limited. Drawing on unique data from Pakistan, we analyzed five different measures of process innovation...

Do constraints to technology adoption vary by behavioral traits? We randomize 150 villages in Bangladesh into being offered standard microcredit, loans with a grace period, the choice between those two contracts, and control. No discernible average effects are detected on the adoption of...

What drives investment in automation technologies? This paper documents a positive relationship between labor-friendly institutions and investment in in- dustrial robots in a sample of developing and advanced economies. Institutions explain a substantial share of cross-country variation in...

Why adoption rate of potentially profitable agricultural technologies in Africa remains low is still puzzling. This paper uses a randomized control trial to study Ugandan subsistence smallholders' decisions to adopt cash crops. A unique way of eliciting farmers price and yield expectations...

There is a dearth of research on the impact of technological change over employment in least developed countries (LDCs) embarking on globalization and consequent international technological transfer. Using a panel of 1,940 Ethiopian firms over the period 1996–2004 and deploying GMMSYS...

The aim of the paper is threefold. First, we compute differences on job tasks (Abstract, Routine and Manual) across a harmonized and hence comparable sample of Anglo-saxon, many European and even Asian advanced countries. We do so by using very precise information on job contents at the worker...

A new technological epoch is underway – the so-called Machine Age –reflecting advances in artificial intelligence, digitalisation and Big Data. Some commentators have claimed that this epoch is different from previous ones in that it will produce large-scale technological unemployment, while...

This study, using original survey data of 10,000 individuals, analyzes the possible impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics on employment. The first interest of this study is to ascertain, from the viewpoint of workers, what types of worker characteristics are associated with the...

In this paper we investigate the impact of non-cognitive skills on the quality of task-specific outcomes by conducting a quasi-experiment on a well-known online crowdsourcing platform. We show that a worker’s performance varies with personality traits, gender, human capital, crowdsourcing...

Technological change and its impacts on labour markets are a much-discussed topic in economics. Economists generally assume that new technology penetrating the labour market shifts firms' task demand. Given individuals' acquired and supplied skills, these task demand shifts potentially foster...