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The Employment Impact of Emerging Digital Technologies

Prytkova, Petit, Li, Chaturvedi, Ciarli

2024CESifo Working Paper16 citations
Exposure / measurementCausal
Automation / RobotsGeneral automationHuman-AI collaborationAugmentation vs. substitutionRoutine task change
View RepositoryDOI: 10.2139/ssrn.4739904
Summary

Prytkova et al. use sentence transformers to compute semantic similarity between 190,714 patents (2012-2021) and ISCO-08/NACE Rev.2 classifications, constructing the 'TechXposure' database measuring exposure of occupations and industries to 40 emerging digital technologies, then estimate employment impacts across 322 European NUTS-2 regions using IV shift-share regression.

Main Finding

A one-standard-deviation increase in regional exposure to emerging digital technologies leads to a 1.069 percentage point (2.1%) increase in the employment-to-population ratio from 2012 to 2019, though substantial heterogeneity exists with 10 individual technologies showing negative employment effects (including industrial robots, IoT, machine learning, cloud storage, and social networking) while others show positive effects.

Primary Datasets

Derwent patent database (190,714 patents, 2012-2021); Regional European Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) for NUTS-2 employment 2012-2019; ISCO-08 occupation classifications; NACE Rev.2 industry classifications

Secondary Datasets

Patent citation data from Derwent; Chaturvedi et al. (2023) novel digital innovation patent sample

Key Methods
NLP-based exposure measurement using sentence transformers and k-means clustering of patent embeddings; IV shift-share regression instrumenting regional exposure with baseline industry shares and industry exposure scores
Sample Period
2012-2019 (employment analysis); 2012-2021 (exposure measurement)
Geographic Coverage
Europe (32 countries, 322 NUTS-2 regions)
Sample Size
322 NUTS-2 regions across 32 European countries; 190,714 patents; 433 4-digit occupations; 271 3-digit industries
Level of Analysis
Occupation, Industry, Region
Occupation Classification
ISCO-08
Industry Classification
NACE Rev.2
Notes
CESifo Working Paper 10955 [Claude classification]: Primary methodological contribution is constructing 'TechXposure' database using sentence transformers to measure occupation/industry exposure to 40 emerging digital technologies from patent clustering. Employment analysis uses shift-share IV strategy similar to Acemoglu & Restrepo (2020). Technologies include 3D printing, IoT, industrial robots, autonomous vehicles, e-commerce, payment systems, cloud computing, machine learning, AR/VR, and health tech. Paper interprets results through task-based framework distinguishing displacement, productivity, and reinstatement effects. [Claude classification]: Primary methodological contribution is constructing 'TechXposure' database using sentence transformers to measure occupation/industry exposure to 40 emerging digital technologies from patent clustering. Employment analysis uses shift-share IV strategy similar to Acemoglu & Restrepo (2020). Technologies include 3D printing, IoT, industrial robots, autonomous vehicles, e-commerce, payment systems, cloud computing, machine learning, AR/VR, and health tech. Paper interprets results through task-based framework distinguishing displacement, productivity, and reinstatement effects. [Claude classification]: Primary methodological contribution is constructing 'TechXposure' database using sentence transformers to measure occupation/industry exposure to 40 emerging digital technologies from patent clustering. Employment analysis uses shift-share IV strategy similar to Acemoglu & Restrepo (2020). Technologies include 3D printing, IoT, industrial robots, autonomous vehicles, e-commerce, payment systems, cloud computing, machine learning, AR/VR, and health tech. Paper interprets results through task-based framework distinguishing displacement, productivity, and reinstatement effects. [Claude classification]: Primary methodological contribution is constructing 'TechXposure' database using sentence transformers to measure occupation/industry exposure to 40 emerging digital technologies from patent clustering. Employment analysis uses shift-share IV strategy similar to Acemoglu & Restrepo (2020). Technologies include 3D printing, IoT, industrial robots, autonomous vehicles, e-commerce, payment systems, cloud computing, machine learning, AR/VR, and health tech. Paper interprets results through task-based framework distinguishing displacement, productivity, and reinstatement effects. [Claude classification]: Primary methodological contribution is constructing 'TechXposure' database using sentence transformers to measure occupation/industry exposure to 40 emerging digital technologies from patent clustering. Employment analysis uses shift-share IV strategy similar to Acemoglu & Restrepo (2020). Technologies include 3D printing, IoT, industrial robots, autonomous vehicles, e-commerce, payment systems, cloud computing, machine learning, AR/VR, and health tech. Paper interprets results through task-based framework distinguishing displacement, productivity, and reinstatement effects. [Claude classification]: Primary methodological contribution is constructing 'TechXposure' database using sentence transformers to measure occupation/industry exposure to 40 emerging digital technologies from patent clustering. Employment analysis uses shift-share IV strategy similar to Acemoglu & Restrepo (2020). Technologies include 3D printing, IoT, industrial robots, autonomous vehicles, e-commerce, payment systems, cloud computing, machine learning, AR/VR, and health tech. Paper interprets results through task-based framework distinguishing displacement, productivity, and reinstatement effects. [Claude classification]: Primary methodological contribution is constructing 'TechXposure' database using sentence transformers to measure occupation/industry exposure to 40 emerging digital technologies from patent clustering. Employment analysis uses shift-share IV strategy similar to Acemoglu & Restrepo (2020). Technologies include 3D printing, IoT, industrial robots, autonomous vehicles, e-commerce, payment systems, cloud computing, machine learning, AR/VR, and health tech. Paper interprets results through task-based framework distinguishing displacement, productivity, and reinstatement effects. [Claude classification]: Primary methodological contribution is constructing 'TechXposure' database using sentence transformers to measure occupation/industry exposure to 40 emerging digital technologies from patent clustering. Employment analysis uses shift-share IV strategy similar to Acemoglu & Restrepo (2020). Technologies include 3D printing, IoT, industrial robots, autonomous vehicles, e-commerce, payment systems, cloud computing, machine learning, AR/VR, and health tech. Paper interprets results through task-based framework distinguishing displacement, productivity, and reinstatement effects. [Claude classification]: Primary methodological contribution is constructing 'TechXposure' database using sentence transformers to measure occupation/industry exposure to 40 emerging digital technologies from patent clustering. Employment analysis uses shift-share IV strategy similar to Acemoglu & Restrepo (2020). Technologies include 3D printing, IoT, industrial robots, autonomous vehicles, e-commerce, payment systems, cloud computing, machine learning, AR/VR, and health tech. Paper interprets results through task-based framework distinguishing displacement, productivity, and reinstatement effects. [Claude classification]: Primary methodological contribution is constructing 'TechXposure' database using sentence transformers to measure occupation/industry exposure to 40 emerging digital technologies from patent clustering. Employment analysis uses shift-share IV strategy similar to Acemoglu & Restrepo (2020). Technologies include 3D printing, IoT, industrial robots, autonomous vehicles, e-commerce, payment systems, cloud computing, machine learning, AR/VR, and health tech. Paper interprets results through task-based framework distinguishing displacement, productivity, and reinstatement effects. [Claude classification]: Primary methodological contribution is constructing 'TechXposure' database using sentence transformers to measure occupation/industry exposure to 40 emerging digital technologies from patent clustering. Employment analysis uses shift-share IV strategy similar to Acemoglu & Restrepo (2020). Technologies include 3D printing, IoT, industrial robots, autonomous vehicles, e-commerce, payment systems, cloud computing, machine learning, AR/VR, and health tech. Paper interprets results through task-based framework distinguishing displacement, productivity, and reinstatement effects.