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Fabrizio Pompei, Mirella Damiani and Alfred Kleinknecht’s paper, “Robots, skills and temporary jobs: evidence from six European countries” shows that in a “high knowledge cumulativeness” innovation regime, robot adoption reduces the probability of high-skilled workers being offered temporary job contracts. At the same time, automatisation did not significantly impact the situation of low- and medium-skilled workers.

The situation is different in “low-cumulativeness” regimes, where companies primarily use externally acquired knowledge in their innovation process. This makes workers more easily interchangeable, and robot adoption increases the probability of temporary contracts for both medium- and high-skilled workers, but leaves low-skilled workers unaffected.

These findings contribute to understanding the increasing share in Europe of temporary workers with tertiary education working as technicians and professionals, as observed by Eurofound.

Mirella Damiani, Fabrizio Pompei & Alfred Kleinknecht (2022): “Robots, skills and temporary jobs: evidence from six European countries”, Industry and Innovation.

https://doi.org/10.1080/13662716.2022.2156851

The event in Cape Town on 14-15 December featured presentations of more than 60 papers; keynotes by Oriana Bandiera of the LSE and Ragui Assaad of the University of Minnesota and a policy panel devoted to youth unemployment in Africa.

Two Untangled researchers presented their research during the forum. Piotr Lewandowski discussed his work with Katarzyna Lipowska and Mateusz Smoter on the work from home model. The authors found that employers’ and employees’ attitudes toward work from home differ in terms of salary expectations and perceived productivity changes.

Zuzanna Kowalik (IBS) presented a paper written jointly with Piotr Lewandowski and Paweł Kaczmarczyk on the differences in job quality and working conditions between native and migrant platform workers in Poland.

In the chapter, “Digitalization, Job Quality, and Subjective Well-being”, Martin and Hauret examine six facets of job quality studied in the literature: labour income; safety at work; working time and work-life balance; job security; skills development and training; employment-related relationships; and work motivation.

The authors also review the literature on the impacts of digitalisation on subjective well-being, captured by employees’ self-reported feelings at work, such as job satisfaction, occupational stress and life satisfaction. Martin and Hauret highlight the key findings in the literature and identify relevant knowledge.

Martin and Hauret find that there is substantial literature on the links between digitalisation and job quality in terms of labour income and work-life balance. However, studies on the link between digitalisation and safety at work, job security, skills development, relationships at work, work motivation and self-reported feelings remain scarce, and this calls for further empirical research. Regardless of the outcome variable, studies report mixed results. Differences in how digitalization and outcome variables are measured and conceptualised, as well as the national and time context and employees’ characteristics, may explain these divergent results and conclusions.

Martin, L., Hauret, L. (2022). “Digitalization, Job Quality, and Subjective Well-being”. In: Zimmermann, K.F. (eds) Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57365-6_388-1.

The conference started with a keynote from Anna Salomons, Professor of Employment and Inequality at Utrecht University, who talked about newly emerging job categories (“new work”) and set the tone for the rest of the event.

The keynote was followed by four very productive thematic sessions on: Technological change and employment; Skills and education; Technology, growth and value chains; and Firms and households, as well as a panel discussion on policy featuring Mario Mariniello (College of Europe), Eric Thode (Bertelsmann Stiftung) and Thomas Ekman Jorgensen (European University Association).

“The conference provided an excellent opportunity both to showcase the work of UNTANGLED researchers and to hear from others in the fields we’re looking at,” says Mikkel Barslund, who coordinates the UNTANGLED research consortium. “We managed to attract a number of high-quality papers with findings that will certainly inspire new avenues of research, and I’d like to thank everyone who contributed to the success of this event.”

To find out more about the papers and presentations, please click here.

To find out more, please visit our events section.

The next Café will take place on 14 February at 2:00-3:30 pm CET.

For IT employees the gap widens to 17%.

Cecilia Jona-Lasinio and Francesco Venturini of the University of Perugia sought to measure the extent to which wage dispersion, where workers who do similar jobs are paid differently, is caused by firms’ propensity to invest in upskilling. The authors analysed spending both on general training and on IT-specific courses.

“Training is seen as a tool for improving employees’ opportunities and working conditions, and for increasing company productivity,” Cecilia Jona-Lasinio said. “The need for training increases with the pace of technological change. With adoption of new technologies and acceleration of automation, formal education and experience are not sufficient, so new competencies are required.”

While previous studies showed 16% of European workers are exposed to skill-displacing technological change, the paper from Jona-Lasinio and Venturini shows that the adverse effects of digitalisation can be also tackled at the company level through training policies.

The authors analysed data from 112,000 companies, employing between 10 and 999 workers, from twelve European countries, and found that 65% provided general training, with the highest proportions observed in France (84%) and the lowest in Bulgaria (26%). One-third of the companies also offered training in advanced digital skills, with the highest number in the UK, Norway, Germany and Denmark.

Data show that firms which invest in training tend to be bigger. The highest wages are paid by organisations where the spending on upskilling is the highest, and where the largest share of the workforce is trained. In terms of the type of training, i.e. internal or external offered by a specialised institution, the combination of both yields the best results, as it gives employees a mixture of company-specific skills and more general ones.

“On an individual level our study shows that people who want to earn more should be ready for lifelong learning, and search for employers who offer training,” – Francesco Venturini says. “Our study also suggests that the wage differences across firms might widen if laggard companies were unable to systematically organise training. We should keep this in mind when designing policies on innovation and support for companies.”

Cecilia Jona-Lasinio & Francesco Venturini (2022). Firm human capital investment, wage inequality and employment (Deliverable 5.4). Leuven: UNTANGLED project 1001004776 – H2020.

The paper is available here

The event will take place in Brussels on 9 November 2022 and feature a keynote address from Anna Salomons, Professor of Employment and Inequality at Utrecht University.

We will have four sessions, 16 papers, and roundtable:

• Session 1: Technological change and employment
• Session 2: Skills and education
• Session 3: Technology, growth and value chains
• Session 4: Firms and households

Register before November 1 HERE.

All the detailed information is in the Programme below. Any queries can be emailed to Ilse Tobback at: ilse.tobback@kuleuven.be

This is an open format driven by participants’ contributions. It can be a platform for you to promote an ongoing project or research, tap into attendants’ collective intelligence for a specific question or simply to enjoy a dynamic thematic conversation. It is an informal online gathering among colleagues (or those to be), to enable exchange between experts, researchers and stakeholders from the fields of digitalisation, globalisation, migration, work, employment, skills etc. and promote exchange and communication among them.

Participants are kindly asked to register and decide if they want to actively contribute or just listen and discuss.

Active contributions consist in one slide (to be submitted to untangled@zsi.at beforehand) and a 5-minute presentation (“elevator pitch”). Listening, receiving information and asking questions is just as welcome. Further contact and networking is up to participants. Collections of slides and announcements will be shared among participants and/or publicly.

Contributions can be:

• any information on an ongoing initiative, project or a result,
• a future-oriented announcement (call for papers, event invitation, search for collaborators)
• a question asked of participants.

With a median age of 44.1, Europe is now the region with the oldest population in the world. Between 1995 and 2021 the share of people aged 50-64 rose substantially in the majority of the EU’s 27 member states, with the highest increases registered in Austria, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain. Europe will be challenged further by demographic changes over the next few decades, even under favourable assumptions about fertility and migration, and the economic effects are not yet fully understood.

In a new study, economists Robert Stehrer and Maryna Tverdostup from the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies (wiiw) looked at how an ageing population affects the growth and automation of the economy in the EU27.

“On the one hand, there is the theory that a demographic time bomb is ticking in Europe, leading to a period of slow growth,” says Tverdostup. “On the other hand, there are also a number of studies which show that countries with a more rapidly ageing population grow faster and invest more in automation. We wanted to check which of these is true for the EU.”

In their key findings the authors conclude that the relationship between population ageing and annual economic growth, measured by growth in GDP as well as GDP per capita, shows a weak negative correlation.

“This means that the ageing of the population in the EU could contribute to weaker growth,” says Stehrer, pointing out that a similar negative relationship between the ageing of the labour force and economic growth has been found in several US states.

Robotisation depends on development, not ageing

While many propose the introduction of new technologies as a solution to the “silver tsunami” of ageing societies, the researchers found no significant link between robotisation and ageing.

“Our results suggest that the level of robotisation is largely dependent on the level of economic development and other absorptive capacities,” says Stehrer.

The study was conducted as part of the EU-funded UNTANGLED project, which aims to examine how the three megatrends of globalisation, technological change and demographic change affect labour markets in the EU and beyond. The authors investigated the effect of an ageing population on economic growth, investment in information and communication technologies, software, databases and robotisation in the 27 EU member states. They analysed national data, Eurostat figures on the capital stock by asset types, the EU Labour Force Survey and data from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR).

Robert Stehrer, Maryna Tverdostup (2022). Demography, capital accumulation and growth (Deliverable 3.2) Leuven: UNTANGLED Project 1001004776 – H2020.

The paper, is available to download here

The event, featured presentations by Inès Baer, head of Data, Analytics and Labour Market Studies at the Luxembourg Employment Agency (ADEM); Ludivine Martin, a LISER researcher and member of the UNTANGLED project; and Tania Treibich of the University of Maastricht.

To find out more click here.