Robots, ICT and employment: evidence from advanced and emerging EU countries

Costanza Bosone, Leonardo Gambacorta, Paolo Giudici, Enisse Kharroubi and Ulf Lewrick

No 1334, BIS Working Papers from Bank for International Settlements

Abstract: We study how robot adoption and investment in information and communication technologies (ICT) jointly shape sectoral employment across 20 European Union (EU) countries over the period 1995-2020. Using a cross-sectional regression design that interacts changes in robot adoption with ICT investment, we find that increases in robot adoption are associated with higher employment in sectors that either entered the period without robots or invested little in ICT. By contrast, robot adoption is associated with lower employment in sectors that initially had some robots and high ICT investment. These findings highlight the importance of both initial conditions and complementary technology investment in shaping labour-market outcomes, suggesting that the employment effects of technology are highly context-dependent.

Keywords: ICT capital; employment; labour market; technology adoption; European Union (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E23 J24 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bis.org/publ/work1334.pdf Full PDF document (application/pdf)
https://www.bis.org/publ/work1334.htm (text/html)

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:bis:biswps:1334

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in BIS Working Papers from Bank for International Settlements Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Martin Fessler ().