2019/22 | LEM Working Paper Series | ||||||||||||||||
Threats and opportunities in the digital era: automation spikes and employment dynamics |
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Giacomo Domini, Marco Grazzi, Daniele Moschella and Tania Treibich |
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Keywords | |||||||||||||||||
Automation; Skills; Technological Change; Gross Worker Flows.
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JEL Classifications | |||||||||||||||||
D25, J23, L25, O33.
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Abstract | |||||||||||||||||
This paper investigates how investment in automation-intensive goods impacts
on worker flows at the firm level and, within firms, across occupational
categories. Resorting to an integrated dataset encompassing detailed information
on firms, their imports, and employer-employee data for French manufacturing
employers over 2002-2015, we identify 'automation spikes' using imports of
intermediates embedding automation technologies and then test their impact on
employment dynamics. We find that automation spikes are positively correlated
with preceding and contemporaneous growth in employment, mainly due to
lower separation rates of investing firms. These differential patterns of net
and gross worker flows do not appear to change significantly across different
types of workers (occupational categories, 'techies', routine-intensive vs. non
routine-intensive jobs).
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