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Are more automatable jobs less satisfying?

Arthur Jacobs, Elsy Verhofstadt and Luc Van Ootegem

Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium from Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration

Abstract: We investigate whether the characteristics which render a job more likely to disappear due to automation also make that job less satisfying. The literature on automation offers convincing reasons infavour of this hypothesis, but it has not been empirically tested before. We use a widely-established, occupation-level measure of automatability and find that more automatable jobs are indeed significantly less satisfying using data from the European Working Conditions Survey. The effect is sizeableand robust to controlling for a wide range of individual-level variables and job-context variables. Our finding suggests that more automatable occupations are less satisfying because of their inherent nature (i.e. the nature of the tasks required for the performance of that occupation). We conduct a mediation analysis and find that the smaller creative intelligence requirement related to automatable occupations is the most important reason for their lower job satisfaction. We discuss to what extent these economy-wide findings translate to the level of the individual worker, in the context of a labor market segmented by education level.

Keywords: Automation; Job Satisfaction; Occupational Task Content; European Working Conditions Survey (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2023-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-lma and nep-tid
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rug:rugwps:23/1059

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