In the paper, our researchers Ronald Bachmann and Myrielle Gonschor from the RWI—Leibniz Institute for Economic Research, alongside Piotr Lewandowski and Karol Madoń from the Institute for Structural Research (IBS), studied how robot adoption affected worker flows in 16 European countries from 2000 to 2017. They found minor benefits for job separations and no effect on job finding.
The study also showed that the impact varies by country depending on initial labour costs. In countries with lower or average labour costs, more robot exposure led to lower job separation rates and better job stability. In these countries, higher robot exposure also increased job finding. This effect was much smaller in countries with higher labour costs.
The authors also found that workers in routine occupations benefitted the most from automation, which contradicts the common notion that such employees can be easily replaced by robots. The paper shows that this result was most pronounced in countries with average initial labour costs and less so in Central and Eastern European countries, due to skills shortages and the nature of investments in robots.
The study suggests that policies should focus on helping workers adapt to technological changes, considering each country’s specific labour market dynamics and institutional factors.
Read the full paper here.
