Automation and Employment over the Technology Life Cycle: Evidence from European Regions

Florencia Jaccoud (), Fabien Petit (), Tommaso Ciarli and Maria Savona ()
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Florencia Jaccoud: UNU-MERIT, United Nations University
Maria Savona: University of Sussex, SPRU

No 24-02, CEPEO Working Paper Series from UCL Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities

Abstract: This paper examines the labor market implications of investment in automation over the life cycle of ICT and robot technologies from 1995 to 2017 in 163 European regions. We first identify major technological breakthroughs during this period and classify phases of acceleration and deceleration in investment. We then examine how exposure to automation technologies affects employment and wages across these different phases of their life cycle. We find that the negligible long-term impact of automation on employment conceals significant short-term positive and negative effects within phases of the technology life cycle. We also find that the negative impact of ICT investments on employment is driven by the phase of the cycle when investment decelerates (and the technology is more mature). The phases of the technology life cycles are more relevant than differences in regions' structural characteristics, such as productivity and sector specialization in explaining the impact of automation to on regional employment.

Keywords: Automation; Technology Life Cycle; Employment; Wages; ICT; Robot (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J21 J31 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 67 pages
Date: 2024-02, Revised 2024-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ict and nep-lma
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https://repec-cepeo.ucl.ac.uk/cepeow/cepeowp24-02.pdf First version, 2024 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Automation and Employment over the Technology Life Cycle: Evidence from European Regions (2024)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucl:cepeow:24-02

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