UNU-MERIT Working Paper #2024-009
Studying and working abroad, internationally mobile scientists meet foreign scientists and become carriers of knowledge and foreign social capital. The benefits of scientific mobility may extend beyond those who experience it, benefiting non-mobile colleagues who collaborate with them. We investigate the role played by Colombian scientists who study abroad for a PhD in connecting non-mobile scientists with foreign scientists.
Research Policy, Volume 53, Issue 3, 2024, 104928
International Journal of Data Science and Analytics
Word embeddings have proven extremely useful across many NLP applications in recent years. Several key linguistic tasks, such as machine translation and transfer learning, require comparing distributed representations of words belonging to different vector spaces within or among different domains and languages to be aligned, known as embedding alignment. To this end, several existing methods exploit words that are supposed to have the same meaning in the two corpora, called seed lexicon or anchors, as reference points to map one embedding into the other.
Research Policy,Volume 53, Issue 2, 2024,
Establishment closures have lasting negative consequences for the workers displaced from their jobs. We study how these consequences vary with the amount of skill mismatch that workers experience after job displacement. Developing new measures of occupational skill redundancy and skill shortage, we analyze the work histories of individuals in Germany between 1975 and 2010. We estimate difference-in-differences models, using a sample of displaced workers who are matched to statistically similar non-displaced workers.
CESifo Working Paper No. 10987
This paper examines the impact of digital automation technologies—ICT, robots, and software and databases—on European regional labor markets during different investment phases of technology life cycles from 1995 to 2017. We first identify major breakthroughs and phases of investment acceleration and deceleration that characterize these life cycles. We then examine how exposure to these technologies affects employment and wages during various life cycle phases.
Research Policy, Volume 53, Issue 2, 2024, 104908
This paper provides empirical evidence on the role of technology in affecting the relationship between the participation of EU countries and industries in Global Value Chains (GVCs) and their employment structure over the period 2000–2014. The empirical analysis is based on country-sector level data for 21 EU countries on employment, trade in value added, patents and investments in intangible assets, and focusses on backward linkages within GVCs.
CESifo Working Paper No. 10955
This paper measures the exposure of industries and occupations to 40 digital technologies that emerged over the past decade 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 ISCO-08/NACE Rev.2 classifications to construct an open–access database, ‘TechXposure’. By combining our data with a shift–share approach, we instrument the regional exposure to emerging digital technologies to estimate their employment impact across European regions.
Pillars Report
The rise of robots has raised a controversial discussion about their disruptive impacts on domestic labor markets. Robot adoption, which is largely concentrated in a few high-income countries, might also affect labor markets of trade partners through global value chain linkages. This effect could be even more pronounced in developing countries due to the predominance of routine tasks and labor-intensive activities.
Pillars Report
The increasing size and importance of digital platforms in various fields of economic activity has raised expectations that virtually everything will be organised via platforms in the future. But will the digital transformation really go that far, or are there limits to it? To answer this question, we have collected and assessed evidence and theoretical arguments about the scope of the gig economy.
IDB WORKING PAPER IDB-WP-1544
Studying and working abroad, internationally mobile scientists meet foreign scientists and become carriers of knowledge. The benefits of international scientific mobility might extend to nonmobile colleagues who collaborate with mobile scientists. In this paper, we investigate the role played by Brazilian and Colombian scientists who are mobile in connecting nonmobile scientists with foreign scientists. We combine publicly available data from online curriculum vitae (CVs), scholarship programs, and publications in OpenAlex.
CESifo Working Paper No. 10865, Munich, 2023
This paper investigates the effect of robotization in high-income countries on firm-level North-South trade along the value chain. Using a novel combination of data sources including firm-level export data, input-output linkages, and robot adoption, we show contrasting implications for Southern firms. Increased exposure to robot adoption in the destination country of exports reduces firm-level exports in case of robot adoption in the same industry. However, the opposite holds when accounting for input-output linkages and trade along the value chain.
CESifo Working Paper No. 10876, Munich, 2023
We study the effects of technological change on immigration flows as well as the labor market outcomes of migrants versus natives. We analyse and compare the effects of two different automation technologies: Industrial robots and artificial intelligence. We exploit data provided by the Industrial Federation of Robotics as well as online job vacancy data on Germany, a highly automated economy and the main destination for migrants in Europe.
Review of International Economics 2023; 1–30
We study how technology adoption and changes in global value chain (GVC) integration jointly affect labor shares and business function specialization in a sample of 14 manufacturing industries in 14 European countries in 1999–2011. Increases in upstream, forward GVC integration directly reduce labor shares, mostly through reductions in fabrication, but also via other business functions. We do not find any direct effects of robot adoption; robotization affects labor only indirectly, by increasing upstream, forward GVC integration. In this sense robotization is “upstream-biased”.
World Bank Research Observer
In this paper we analyze the evidence of job polarization—the relative decline of mid-wage jobs—in developing and emerging economies. We carry out an extensive literature review, revealing that job polarization in these countries is only incipient compared to advanced economies. We then examine the possible moderating aspects explaining this lack of job polarization. We distinguish three groups of explanations: Limited technology adoption; structural change; and changes in the global value chains.
Pillars Report
Identification of emerging digital automation technologies is critical to understanding the changing patterns of work, firm and industry organisation, and labor demand, and thus formulating policies to mitigate the associated risks while harnessing their potential benefits. In this paper, we analyse a large corpus comprising millions of patents and scientific publications from Derwent, PATSTAT, and OpenAlex databases related to automation technologies across a wide range of domains, including but not limited to industrial robots and artificial intelligence.
Pillars Report
This paper investigates the impact of job training on workers’ susceptibility to automation. Using rich individual-level data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) across 37 industrialized countries, we construct a unique individual-level measure of automation risk based on the tasks performed at work. We uncover substantial variation in automation risk within detailed occupations,which would have been overlooked by previous occupation-level automation measures.
Regional Studies (2023): 1-17
Do creative industries have positive spillovers for the local economy in middle-income countries? While in high-income countries several studies have shown that creative industries are highly innovative and productive, positively impacting the local economy, the evidence is scarce for middle-income countries. Using employment data, we studied the agglomeration patterns of creative industries in Colombia between 2008 and 2017. We found a positive relationship between creative industries’ agglomeration and employment in non-creative services industries.
Pillars Report
Which occupations will grow in the future and where? What skills will be demanded the most in the next years? How technology and digitalisation will affect existing and well-consolidated occupations? Those are the questions at the forefront of the policy debate among economists and policymakers. To address these questions, data-driven and real-time analysis of the labour market is needed to catch novelties - in terms of skills and new emerging jobs - as soon as they emerge from the labour market demand.
Pillars Report
This report aims to study the speed and direction of change that occupations undergo regarding skills composition for different European regions. One peculiar aspect of this research is the application of AI methods, such as word embeddings and machine learning to conduct economic analysis. We measure changes in the occupation skill sets based on the words used to advertise job vacancies in online job ads (OJAs) to measure changes between and within European countries, considering occupations’ specificity.
CESifo Working Paper No. 10288
We develop novel measures of early-career skills that are more detailed, comprehensive, and labor-market-relevant than existing skill proxies. We exploit that skill requirements of apprenticeships in Germany are codified in state-approved, nationally standardized apprenticeship plans. These plans provide more than 13,000 different skills and the exact duration of learning each skill. Following workers over their careers in administrative data, we find that cognitive, social, and digital skills acquired during apprenticeship are highly – yet differently – rewarded.
CESifo Working Paper No. 10281
We study how technology adoption and changes in global value chain (GVC) integration jointly affect labor shares and business function specialization in a sample of 14 manufacturing industries in 14 European countries in 1999–2011. Our main contribution is to highlight the indirect effect of robotization on relative demand for labor via GVC integration. To do this, we develop a methodology to separately account for robots in the total capital stock.
CESifo Working Paper No. 10237
This paper examines the labor market adjustments to four automation technologies (i.e. robots, communication technology, information technology, and software/database) in 227 regions across 22 European countries from 1995 to 2017. By constructing a measure of technology penetration, we estimate changes in regional employment and wages affected by automation technologies along with the reallocation of workers between sectors.
Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) 23-02, Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography
In this report we evaluate the opportunities for regional diversification in Europe over the last decade. We use microdata from the European Labour Force Survey to empirically test the entry and exit of occupational specializations at the regional level. Our results show that NUTS 2 regions are more likely to diversify into new occupations that are related to their existing local labour markets. So, the new opportunities for diversification are path-dependent, that is, they depend on the previous (occupational) production structure of the regions.
Pillars Report
The paper examines the long-run versus short-run implications for labour markets of exposure to four automation technologies—robots, communication, information and software and databases. By applying a multiple break-point algorithm we identify investment cycles for each technology as affecting employment, wages, and wage shares for 163 NUTS-2 regions in 12 European countries over 1995-2017. In the long run, we find that robots have increased employment but reduced wages and the wage share in the region.
Pillars Report
In recent decades, major secular trends in the labor market have significantly changed occupations and the skills demanded in occupations. In particular, advances in technologies and international outsourcing have decreased demand for certain types of tasks. Routine occupations are particularly vulnerable to automation risks, i.e., the risk that their tasks will be replaced by robots and automation technologies. Further, workers in occupations performing tasks that can be outsourced abroad face similar changes in skill demand due to lower trade barriers and technological advances.
Pillars Report
There is a aggregate decline of manual-routine occupations due to substitution by automation capital, as these occupations perform tasks that can be easily replaced by machines. Similarly, technological progress and reduced trade barriers put occupations at an increased risk of offshoring, as their tasks can be performed abroad.
Pillars Report
This report addresses is taking stock of the extant literature on the potential effects of technological change on labour outcomes. The paper focusses on the link between technological change, jobs and tasks. The paper makes a crucial contribution to existing reviews of the technology-employment nexus, by focusing on the technical and engineering literature, that describes the design of new technologies and how these execute tasks and jobs across industries.
Pillars Report
Labor market developments such as globalization, structural transformation, and accelerating technological change can lead to mismatches between firms’ skill demand and employees’ skill supply. While skill mismatch is heavily discussed in research and policy, empirical evidence on the existence and determinants of skill mismatch in Europe is very scarce. In this paper, we develop novel measures of skill mismatch in Europe to address various questions of high relevance for labor market policies in the European Union: (1) How prevalent is skill mismatch in Europe?
CESifo Working Paper No. 10026
Immigration is one of the most divisive political issues in many countries today. Competing narratives, circulated via the media, are crucial in shaping how immigrants’ role in society is perceived. We propose a new method combining advanced natural language processing tools with dictionaries to identify sentences containing one or more of seven immigrant narrative themes and assign a sentiment to each of these. Our narrative dataset covers 107,428 newspaper articles from 70 German newspapers over the 2000 to 2019 period.
EconPol Forum 23 (5), 43-47
In B. Wawrzyniak & M. Herter (ed.), Neue Dimensionen in Data Science (Chapter 20, p. 227-242). Wichmann Fachmedien Berlin - Offenbach.
We analyze the prevalence of working from home (WfH) in Germany using more than 35 million online job advertisements from 2014 to 2021. While the option to work from home was rare in job advertisements before the coronavirus crisis, the shock of the pandemic led to a boom. At the same time, regional, occupational, and sectoral inequalities in access to WfH have decreased during the pandemic. We also document a higher demand for digital skills, teamwork, and adaptability in job ads with a WfH option.
Regional Studies, Forthcoming special issue: The dark side of innovation and its geography.
As regions evolve, their economies become more complex, and they tend to diversify into related activities. Although there is a bright side to this diversification process in terms of economic development, there may also be a dark side to it, as it possibly contributes to regional inequalities. The paper uses data on industries and patents to analyse the diversification patterns of 283 regions in 32 European countries over the past 15 years. We find that only the most economically advanced regions have the opportunity to diversify into highly complex activities.
Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) 22-16, Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography
The literature has shown that related diversification in more complex industries enhances economic growth in regions but also inter-regional inequality. However, it has drawn little attention to the relationship between industrial dynamics (i.e. the rise and fall of industries) and intra-regional wage inequality.
Pillars Report
We study the effects of technological change on immigration flows as well as the labor market outcomes of migrants versus natives. We analyse and compare the effects of two different automation technologies: Industrial robots and artificial intelligence. We exploit data provided by the Industrial Federation of Robotics as well as online job vacancy data on Germany, a highly automated economy and the main destination for migrants in Europe.
CESifo Working Paper No.9758
In this paper, we present theory and global evidence on how mobile internet access affects desire and plans to emigrate. Our theory predicts that mobile internet access increases desire and plans to emigrate. Our empirical analysis combines survey data on 617,402 individuals from 2,120 subnational districts in 112 countries with data on worldwide 3G mobile internet rollout from 2008 to 2018. We show that an increase in mobile internet access increases the desire and plans to emigrate. Instrumenting 3G rollout with pre-existing 2G infrastructure suggests that the effects are causal.
CESifo Working Paper No. 9703
When workers are displaced from their jobs in mass layoffs or firm closures, they experience lasting adverse labor market consequences. We study how these consequences vary with the amount of skill mismatch that workers experience when returning to the labor market. Using novel measures of skill redundancy and skill shortage, we analyze individuals' work histories in Germany between 1975 and 2010. We estimate difference-in-differences models, using a sample in which we match displaced workers to statistically similar non-displaced workers.
Industrial and Corporate Change, Volume 31, Issue 3, June 2022, Pages 811–837
This paper aims at revisiting the empirical evidence on the recent trends of countries’ integration in global value chains (GVCs) in Europe. It investigates two potential sources of unbalances that these processes might relate to (i) the sectoral specialization of the patterns of international fragmentation, whether high-technology manufacturing or knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS), and (ii) the occupational categories that have benefited or been penalized by these trends.
CESifo Working Paper No.9444
This paper analyses the evidence of job polarization in developing and emerging economies. We carry out an extensive literature review, revealing that job polarization in these countries is only incipient compared to other advanced economies. We then examine the possible moderating aspects explaining this job polarization paradox.
CESifo Working Paper No. 9438
This paper provides empirical evidence on the complex role played by technology in affecting the relationship between the participation of EU countries and industries in Global Value Chains (GVCs) and their employment structure over the period 2000-2014. The empirical analysis is based on country/industry level data for 21 EU countries on employment, trade in value added, patents and investments in intangible assets, and focusses on backward linkages within GVCs.
Research Policy Volume 50, Issue 7, September 2021
In order to better understand the complex and dialectical relationships between digital technologies, innovation, and skills, it is necessary to improve our understanding of the coevolution between the trajectories of connected digital technologies, firm innovation routines, and skills formation. This is critical as organizations recombine and adapt digital technologies; they require new skills to innovate, learn, and adapt to evolving digital technologies, while digital technologies change the codification of knowledge for productive and innovative activities.
UNU-MERIT Working Papers #2021-023
The paper provides a novel, theoretically driven map of EU regional asymmetries, based on the shares and dynamics of high-tech employment and wages, as well as the structure of inter-regional Input-Output relations at the EU NUTS-1 regional level. We use data from EUROSTAT and the EU-REGIO database to perform a trade-aware shift-share analysis coupled with a hierarchical clustering. We show that EU regions present a fractal structure of asymmetries, i.e. the emergence of core-periphery relations at progressively smaller scales, in relation to both spatial and trade dimensions.