This paper estimates the impact of firm-level investments in automation technologies on worker-level outcomes. It finds that automation increases the probability of incumbent workers separating from their employers, in line with recent task-based models of automation. It shows that incumbent workers experience a 5-year cumulative wage income loss of 9 percent of one year’s earnings on average, driven by decreases in days worked. These adverse impacts of automation are larger in smaller firms, and for older and less-educated workers. By contrast, no such losses are found for firms' investments in computers.

This paper discusses recent evidence about the impact of AI on workers and workplaces, and the implications of AI for data goverance. For firms and their workers, it is important to understand how AI changes working conditions, workers’ representation and the protection of acquired rights, and the balance of power between firms and workers more broadly. A challenge for data governance is to reconcile the objectives of creating private incentives to maximise data sharing for purposes of public interest, while limiting the concentration of private value arising from (involuntary or voluntary) data collection and analytics.

Starting from the debate on job quality, this chapter first gives an overview of the literature on job polarization: the idea that job markets are polarizing into lovely and lousy jobs at the expense of middling jobs originates from the early 1980s. During the following decades, the phenomenon of job polarization was documented for many advanced economies and its drivers became better understood. To summarize the intuition that economists currently have about these drivers, the chapter then provides a simple intuitive framework and some empirical evidence in support of it.

The digitaltransformation is rapidly changingthe demand for workers’ skills, and this poses several challenges. One such challenge is how do we define ‘skills’ in the digital economy. Another challenge is who invest in workers’ digital skills? This chapter discusses 1) policies to better measure digital skills, personal learning accounts; 2) policies focussed on training of workers; and 3) the role of intermediaries to help reduce the skills gap.

This paper uses unique survey data of workers at a large car plant who became unemployed when the plant closed. In line with the RBTC hypothesis, it finds that re-employment probabilities 1,5 years after the plant’s closure are substantially higher for workers with nonroutine task competencies and with digital skills. Moreover, for the subset of individuals who were re-employed 1,5 years after the plant’s closure, the paper finds that the nonroutine content of job tasks is higher, wages are lower, and contracts are less permanent.

Using a large-scale survey of innovation within Dutch enterprises, linked with register data, this study examines how technology implementation within workplaces impacts job ending among workers. We examine how the impact of technology differs depending on a worker' education, organizational tenure and age. We find that, for the technologies captured in our survey data, innovation is associated with an overall decrease in a worker’s probability to leave the firm. We also find that higher educational attainment is associated with a lower probability of job ending. Furthermore, we find that older workers and workers with longer organizational tenure have a higher probability of job ending when their firm innovates. Finally, we do not find the probability of job ending to change differently depending on the union density of the industry in which the firm operates. In conclusion, our results do not support a simple view about the impact of technology adoption on individual workers' job ending probabilities.

This paper uses a Dutch firm-level survey on automation expenditures linked to administrative records covering the universe of firms in the Netherlands to consider firm-level automation over 2000–2016. It shows that net employment at firms falls after investments in automation technology. Importantly, this effect arises among both manufacturing and nonmanufacturing firms, indicating that this is not specific to technologies like robotics.

This paper shows that the labour market is organized along jobs and their task content. It shows that tightness in markets for jobs for which an unemployed job seeker fully qualifies in terms of her task competencies is predictive of her unemployment duration. The paper also finds that unemployed job seekers do not compete in markets where they possess only part of the required task competencies, suggesting that task overlap across jobs is unimportant for worker mobility between job markets.

Using a large-scale survey of innovation within Dutch enterprises, linked with register data, we create a longitudinal (2000–2014) employer–employee dataset to study the effect of technology implementation on enterprise workforces. While the proportion of middle educated workers leaving enterprises increases, we also find an increase in the number of middle educated entrants. Our main finding regarding changes in the age structure is that there is an increase in the proportion of older workers. Finally, our results regarding institutional variation do not lend a simple interpretation of different effects in more unionized enterprises. In conclusion, our results do not support a simple view about the impact of technology adoption on workplaces.

This paper uses historical labour market data for Belgium for the period 1846–2011 to illustrate how the employment impacts of the ongoing Digital Revolution after 1980 compare to those of the Second Industrial Revolution before 1980. In particular, it shows that labour markets after 1980 are not uniquely characterized by exceptionally high labour market turbulence but by the nature of changes in the composition of jobs, namely a process of job polarization.

This paper gives an overview of current thinking by economists about the consequences of ongoing technological progress for labour markets, and discusses policy implications. The paper first discusses how the impact of technological progress on labour markets can be explained by the following two channels: (i) the nature of interactions between differently skilled workers and new technologies affecting labour demand and (ii) the equilibrium effects of technological progress through consequent changes in labour supply and product markets. The paper then concludes by discussing a set of policy interventions.

This article finds that each worker in a high-skilled occupation creates up to five extra jobs in local less-skilled-intensive services in the same region. However, it is also shown that there exist persistent differences in the size of this local high-tech job multiplier across regions.

This paper finds that there is an upward selection bias in students' course evaluations, and that correcting for this bias has non-negligible effects on the average evaluation score and on the evaluation-based ranking of courses. However, we find that adjusting for selection only has small impacts on the measured effects of observables on course evaluations, validating a large related literature which considers the observable determinants of evaluation scores without correcting for selection bias.

This paper documents the pervasiveness of job polarization in 16 Western European countries over the period 1993–2010. It then develops and estimates a framework to explain job polarization using routine-biased technological change and offshoring. This model can explain much of both total job polarization and the split into within-industry and between-industry components.

What types of jobs are becoming more important in our economies, and what causes these changes? This timely book by Daniel Oesch attempts to tackle these questions for five European countries (Britain, Denmark, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland), over 1990 to 2008. For each country, Oesch analyzes changes in the structure of employment. Overall, the book is an interesting read, providing a general overview of the main drivers of occupational change.

This paper introduces matching in two-sided markets. It shows that a platform’s positive cross-side and negative own-side network externalities can be summarized by a general matching function that captures the efficiency of the platform’s matching technology. The paper also shows that the pricing strategy of a monopoly matchmaker only partially internalizes the efficiency of its matching technology.

This paper documents the pervasiveness of job polarization across 16 European countries. It also discusses several hypotheses about the reasons for job polarization. First, the “routinization” hypothesis (first put forward by Autor, Levy, and Murnane 2003) suggests that technological progress is to replace “routine” labor which tends to be clerical and craft jobs in the middle of the wage distribution. Second, there is the view that globalization is an important source of change in the job structure in the richest countries. Third, the rise in the share of income going to the rich may have led to an increase in demand for low-skill workers whose employment increasingly consists of providing services to the rich.

This paper shows that the United Kingdom since 1975 has exhibited a pattern of job polarization with rises in employment shares in the highest- and lowest-wage occupations. It argues that this is not entirely consistent with the idea of skill-biased technical change as a hypothesis about the impact of technology on the labor market. Instead, it shows that the “routinization” hypothesis recently proposed by Autor, Levy, and Murnane (2003) is a better explanation of job polarization.

There has been a large rise in the number of well paid jobs in the UK over the past 25 years, but also a rise in the number of badly paid jobs. The most likely cuase of these trends is technology replacing middling jobs, with structural changes in the labour force playing a less important role. Policies to increase pay among the low paid, and immigration seem likely to be most effective at dealing with the problems caused by the increasing polarization of work.