1,721,089 research outputs found
Job polarization in European industries
No full textJob polarization instead of pure upgrading is emerging in European industries. This article focuses on polarization of the employment structure and contributes empirical evidence to explain patterns of occupational change in relation to four major groups: managers, clerks, craft workers and manual workers. Building on the structural approach, the author aims to analyse employment dynamics at the sectoral level and shed light on job polarization trends in Europe. Job polarization clearly emerges, mainly in service sectors, and in some European countries it is leading to a rejection of the hypothesis of skill upgrading sustained by the skill-biased technical change paradigm
Technology, employment and skills
No full textThis article investigates the relationships between technological change and employment considering the dynamics of four major professional groups - Managers, Clerks, Craft and Manual workers–defined on the basis of ISCO classes. The aim is to move beyond skill-biased and task-based views of the impact of technical change on skills and to identify the structural determinants of employment changes. A model is developed explaining changes in jobs as a result of changes in demand–total, domestic and foreign –, wages, the importance of innovation in products and processes and the role of the international fragmentation of production. The empirical analysis is carried out on manufacturing and service industries of major European countries over the 2000–2014 period. Results show that moving from aggregate employment to the dynamics of professional groups major diversities emerge; managers–for instance–are the main beneficiaries from product innovations, while clerks, craft and manual workers are negatively affected by the introduction of new processes. Separate estimations are also carried out for high and low tech industries and for Northern and Southern European countries, identifying a variety of ways in which patterns of innovation and structural change affect jobs in specific professional groups
Jobs and Competitiveness in a Polarised Europe
Full text linkIn the aftermath of the crisis, Europe is becoming more polarised in terms of employment, competitiveness and industrial specialisation. A “German-centred core”–which maintained employment and production–has emerged, contrasted by a “Southern periphery”, where major economic losses have occurred. Such geographical divergence is associated with a further polarisation in terms of skills. A new European industrial policy is needed to reverse this polarisation process and its dangerous implications for trade balances and cohesion
Digitalizing industry? Labor, technology and work organization: an introduction to the Forum
No full textDigitalizing industry? Labor, technology and work
organization: an introduction to the Foru
Patterns of innovation and wage distribution. Do “innovative firms” pay higher wages? Evidence from Chile
No full textIn this paper we investigate the innovative patterns of Chilean productive sectors applying multivariate analysis methods such as factor and cluster analysis. Three main patterns are detected in our sample according to the type of innovation introduced and the motivation behind it: product strategy innovators, cost strategy innovators and non-innovators. Starting on this clustering, we analyze the relationship between innovative pattern (or type of innovation introduced) and wage for professional category. We found a positive impact of product innovations on wages for all professional groups except unskilled manual workers. Controlling for unobserved firm heterogeneity through a fixed effect panel estimator, coefficients are not significant anymore for all professional categories. Only for innovations in marketing we can still register a wage premium earned by high skilled workers. Finally, we do not register a polarization effect as the one detected for Europe by recent literature
Platform work and economic insecurity in Italy
No full textUsing representative survey data from Italy, this study investigates the levels and sources of economic security amongst platform workers relative to other labour force participants. Platform workers face greater economic insecurity relative to all other occupation groups, and a rate of economic insecurity that is not significantly different from that of unemployed adults. Higher levels of insecurity are not primarily channelled through lower incomes; instead, higher rates of insecurity persist when accounting for family incomes, suggesting that other dimensions of precarity associated with platform work matter as much as income differences in shaping economic insecurity
Regimes of robotization in Europe
No full textThis work analyses the impact of robots on employment testing for the presence of different robotization regimes. Focusing on European manufacturing industries, we find that robot adoption positively affects total employment. Heterogeneous patterns are detected across both countries and occupational groups, however. The labour-friendly impact of robotization is detected only in core and service-oriented countries and for those at the top of the occupational structure (i.e. managers and technicians). In turn, peripheral countries and manual workers do not seem to benefit at all from robotization
The higher educated, the lower paid: the fixed-term wage penalty within highly educated workers in Italy
No full textThis paper explores the temporary-permanent wage gap experienced by Italian graduate workers. To evaluate the wage gap along the entire wage distribution and account for heterogeneous effects of temporary employment, we apply the Recentered Influence Function (RIF) regression approach. The results suggest that the monthly net wage earned by Italian highly educated workers having a temporary contract is lower than that of their ‘permanent’ counterparts even after controlling for a plethora of individual and job characteristics. More than 50% of the wage gap is due to unobserved characteristics. The field of study, more than the location of the University, explains this discrimination effect due to contractual arrangement. Although the latter is verified along the entire distribution, major effects arise among high-paid and low-paid jobs depicting a U-shape pattern. Results are robust to self-selection, endogeneity, and gender controls
Technology and occupations in business cycles
Full text linkBuilding on studies on the impact of the Great Recession on the occupational and skill structure of employment, this article investigates developments over the last business cycle (2002–2007 and 2007–2011) in 36 manufacturing and service industries of five major European countries (Germany, France, Spain, Italy and United Kingdom). We analyse how technology, education and wages have shaped the evolution of four professional groups—Managers, Clerks, Craft and Manual workers—defined on the basis of ISCO classes. During the upswing in manufacturing industries all professional groups except managers have experienced job losses, while new jobs in services have followed a pattern of growing occupational polarization. Demand growth has a general positive effect across all occupations; new products lead to job creation in the group of managers only; wage increases slow down job creation except in the lowest occupational group. During the downswing, large job losses are concentrated in the lowest occupations and most relationships—including the role of demand and wages—break down; product innovation loses its positive impact on jobs while new processes drive restructuring and job destruction across all professional groups
Weaker jobs, weaker innovation. Exploring the effects of temporary employment on new products
No full textThis work explores the relationship between temporary employment and product innovation focusing on five major European economies (France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands) observed between 1998 and 2012. The analysis distinguishes sectors according to their technological characteristics and regimes finding that industries using temporary employment tend to have a weaker product innovation propensity. The negative correlation between temporary employment and innovation turns out to be stronger in those sectors where tacit firm’s specific knowledge is crucial to the development of innovations. These sectors are identified using both the ‘Cumulativeness’ proxy stemming from Peneder’s classification as well as distinguishing between different Schumpeterian regimes–Schumpeter Mark I vs. II–of knowledge accumulation
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