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

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...

We analyse how the adoption of technological innovations correlates with workers' perceived levels of job insecurity, and what factors mediate such relationship, by exploiting a recent, large and dedicated survey distributed to a representative sam- ple of Italian workers. The dedicated survey...

Technological advancements bring changes to our life, altering our behaviors as well as our role in the economy. In this paper, we examine the potential effect of the rise of robotic technology on health. The results of the analysis suggest that higher penetration of industrial robots in the...

The economic impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is studied using a (semi) endogenous growth model with two novel features. First, the task approach from labor economics is reformulated and integrated into a growth model. Second, the standard representative household assumption is rejected,...

This paper models and estimates total factor productivity (TFP) growth parametrically. The model is a generalization of the traditional production model where technology is represented by a time trend. TFP growth is decomposed into unobservable technical change, scale economies and observable...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the productivity impact of business visits, relative to traditional drivers of productivity enhancement, namely capital formation and R&D. To carry out the analysis, we combine unique and novel data on business visits sourced from the U.S. National...

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 estimates,...

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...