Disasters and technological upgrading measured by changes in demand for ICT labour: estimating the impacts with text

Jorge Campos-González ()
Additional contact information
Jorge Campos-González: University of Reading

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2025, vol. 121, issue 1, No 35, 957 pages

Abstract: Abstract Extensive literature has studied the economic impact of disasters. However, specific impacts on labour markets have received less attention. Using a massive earthquake (> 8.0 Mw) that struck Chile in 2010 and proprietary data from a Chilean online job board (4136 job postings published between 2008 and 2012), we examine changes in demand for Information and Communications Technologies, ICT, related labour as a proxy for technological upgrading, by assuming that ICT and related technologies drive much of the technical change in production. We implement a structural topic model to discover and estimate the difference in the prevalence of ICT and Construction labour, among others. Our results show that ICT labour does not change. In contrast, Construction labour significantly differed after the disaster, suggesting that reconstruction activities led to employment differences. Our results suggest that there was no substantive technological replacement following the earthquake.

Keywords: Labour markets; Disasters; Technological upgrading; Creative destruction; ICT labour (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J20 O33 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11069-024-06863-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:nathaz:v:121:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1007_s11069-024-06863-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11069

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-024-06863-z

Access Statistics for this article

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards is currently edited by Thomas Glade, Tad S. Murty and Vladimír Schenk

More articles in Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards from Springer, International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().