The Employment Impact of Emerging Digital Technologies

Ekaterina Prytkova, Fabien Petit (), Deyu Li, Sugat Chaturvedi and Tommaso Ciarli

No 10955, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: This paper measures the exposure of industries and occupations to a broad set of emerging digital technologies 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 international standard classifications, creating the open–access ‘TechXposure’ database. Through a shift–share design, we instrument regional exposure to estimate the effects of these technologies on employment across European regions. We find a net positive impact, with growth in low- and high-skilled employment at the expense of middle-skilled jobs, suggesting ongoing job polarization. At the technology level, we observe significant heterogeneity: robots and machine learning negatively impact employment (except for high-skilled workers), while workflow management and information processing systems have positive effects. Our results suggest that focusing narrowly on specific technologies like AI and robots may overlook broader positive employment impacts stemming from complementarities among diverse digital technologies.

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)
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-ict, nep-ino, nep-lma, nep-sbm, nep-tid and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Working Paper: The Employment Impact of Emerging Digital Technologies (2024)
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