De-Routinization in the Fourth Industrial Revolution - Firm-Level Evidence

Melanie Arntz, Sabrina Genz (), Terry Gregory (), Florian Lehmer () and Ulrich Zierahn-Weilage
Additional contact information
Sabrina Genz: Utrecht University
Terry Gregory: LISER
Florian Lehmer: Institute for Employment Research (IAB), Nuremberg

No 16740, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: 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 that adopters of frontier technologies contribute substantially to deroutinization. However, this is driven only by a subset of these firms: large adopters replace routine jobs and less routine-intensive adopters experience faster growth. These scale and composition effects reflect firms' readiness to adopt and implement frontier technologies. Our results suggest that an acceleration of technology adoption would be associated with faster de-routinization and an increase in between-firm heterogeneity.

Keywords: technology; automation; tasks; capital-labor substitution; decomposition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J21 J23 J24 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 65 pages
Date: 2024-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-eff, nep-ino, nep-lma and nep-tid
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Working Paper: De-routinization in the fourth industrial revolution: Firm-level evidence (2024)
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