Technological innovation and employment in derived labour demand models: A hierarchical meta-regression analysis

Mehmet Ugur (), Sefa Awaworyi Churchill and Edna Solomon

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The effect of technological innovation on employment is of major concern for workers and their unions, policy-makers and academic researchers. We aim to provide a quantitative synthesis of the evidence base and the extent of heterogeneity therein. Analysing 567 estimates from 35 primary studies that estimate a derived labour demand model we report the following findings: (i) the effect on employment is positive but small and highly heterogeneous; (ii) publication selection bias reflects a tendency to support the twin hypotheses that process innovation is associated with job destruction whereas product innovation is associated with job creation; (iii) the effects of process and product innovations do not conform to theoretical predictions or narrative review findings after selection bias is controlled for; (iv) only a small part of the residual heterogeneity is explained by moderating factors; (v) country-specific effect-size estimates are related to labour-market and product-market regulation in six OECD countries in a U-shaped fashion; and (vi) OLS estimates reflect upward bias whereas those based on time-differenced or within estimators reflect a downward bias. Our findings bridge the evidence gap in the research field and point out to data quality and modeling issues that should be considered in future research.

Keywords: Innovation; employment; technological change; labour demand; meta-analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C49 C80 J23 O30 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-07-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-ino, nep-lma and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/73557/1/MPRA_paper_73557.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Technological innovation and employment in derived labour demand models: a hierarchical meta-regression analysis (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:73557

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().