The Employment Impact of Emerging Digital Technologies

Ekaterina Prytkova (), Fabien Petit (), Deyu Li (), Sugat Chaturvedi and Tommaso Ciarli
Additional contact information
Ekaterina Prytkova: Cote d'Azur University and University of Sussex
Deyu Li: Utrecht University

No 24-01, CEPEO Working Paper Series from UCL Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities

Abstract: This paper measures the exposure of industries and occupations to 40 digital technologies that emerged over the past decade and estimates their impact on European employment. Using a novel approach that leverages sentence transformers, we calculate exposure scores based on the semantic similarity between patents and ISCO-08/NACERev.2 classifications to construct an open-access database, 'TechXposure'. By combining our data with a shift-share approach, we instrument the regional exposure to emerging digital technologies to estimate their employment impact across European regions. We find an overall positive effect of emerging digital technologies on employment, with a one-standard deviation increase in regional exposure leading to a 1.069 percentage point increase in the employment-to-population ratio. However, upon examining the individual effects of these technologies, we find that smart agriculture, the internet of things, industrial and mobile robots, digital advertising, mobile payment, electronic messaging, cloud storage, social network technologies, and machine learning negatively impact regional employment.

Keywords: Occupation Exposure; Industry Exposure; Text as Data; Natural Language Processing; Sentence Transformers; Emerging Digital Technologies; Automation; Employment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 J24 O31 O33 O34 O52 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 73 pages
Date: 2024-02, Revised 2024-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-lma and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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https://repec-cepeo.ucl.ac.uk/cepeow/cepeowp24-01.pdf First version, 2024 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Employment Impact of Emerging Digital Technologies (2024)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucl:cepeow:24-01

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