European regional employment and exposure to labour-saving technical change: results from a direct text similarity measure

Federico Riccio, Jacopo Staccioli and Maria Enrica Virgillito

LEM Papers Series from Laboratory of Economics and Management (LEM), Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy

Abstract: Does labour-saving technological change pose a threat to European employment, and if so, to what extent? This study investigates the degree of employment exposure to labour-saving technological change across NUTS-2 regions in Europe. We construct a cross-walked metric between the SOC and ISCO classification systems to adapt the direct measure of occupational exposure developed by Montobbio et al. (2024) for the US economy and apply it to the European context. This methodology enables us to generate detailed insights into the exposure of European occupations by leveraging the similarity rankings between technological classifications in the USPTO (CPCs) and task descriptions. To evaluate the transmission from occupational exposure to employment outcomes, we utilise data from the European Structure of Earnings Survey (EU-SES), thereby constructing exposure indices at both sectoral and regional levels. Finally, we examine the industrial and geographical diffusion of labour-saving technological change in recent years and provide robust econometric evidence indicating that low-wage regions, as well as deindustrialising areas heavily integrated into global value chains, are disproportionately vulnerable to the threat of substitution.

Keywords: regional disparities; manufacturing downgrading; automation; global value chains (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-05-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec and nep-tid
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.lem.sssup.it/WPLem/files/2025-19.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:ssa:lemwps:2025/19

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LEM Papers Series from Laboratory of Economics and Management (LEM), Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).