Abstract
AbstractThe strong rise of digitalization, automation, machine learning and other related new digital technologies has led to an intense debate about their societal impacts. The transitions of occupations and the effects on labor demand and workers’ wages are still open questions. Research projects dealing with this issue often face a lack of data on the usage of new digital technologies. This paper uses a novel linked employer–employee data set that contains detailed information on establishments’ technological upgrading between 2011 and 2016, a recent period of rapid technological progress. Furthermore, we are the first to develop a digital tools index based on the German expert database BERUFENET. The new index contains detailed information on the work equipment that is used by workers. Hence, we observe the degree of digitalization on both the establishment level and the worker level. The data allow us to investigate the impact of technology investments on the wage growth of employees within establishments. Overall, the results from individual level fixed effects estimates suggest that investments in new digital technologies at the establishment level positively affect the wages of the establishments’ workers. Sector-specific results show that investments in new digital technologies increase wages in knowledge intensive production establishments and non-knowledge intensive services. The wage growth effects of employees indigital pioneerestablishments relative to the specific reference group of workers indigital latecomerestablishments are most pronounced for low- and medium-skilled workers.
Highlights
In recent years, advances in mobile robotics and machine learning have fostered the ongoing digitization1 and automation in developed economies
They use the direct measure of technological adoption obtained from the same novel linked employer–employee data used in our study to explore the job creation and job destruction channels at the establishment level
Due to the “natural” high volume of digital technologies in Office and communication technologies (OCT), the share of non-ITsupported technologies is much lower (42.8 %) than the corresponding group of manually controlled Production technologies (PT) (83.1 %). In both PT and OCT, there is a slight trend towards IT-supported and indirectly controlled technologies, but this trend seems to evolve rather slowly. Based on this categorization and further information provided by the survey,4 we differentiate the groups of establishments as follows: Latecomers are defined as establishments who indicate that they do not use new digital technologies; the share of new digital technologies in the year 2016 is 0 %
Summary
Advances in mobile robotics and machine learning have fostered the ongoing digitization and automation in developed economies. As existing literature is confronted with a lack of data on the usage of new digital technologies, studies often exploit the change in occupational tasks resulting from the implementation of industrial robots (see, for instance, Acemoglu/Restrepo 2017; Dauth et al 2017; Graetz/Michaels 2015). Graetz and Michaels (2015) find no significant reduction in the overall employment, while their estimates suggest that industrial robots may be reducing the employment of low-skilled workers They find a positive effect of the diffusion of robots on wages. One of the first studies to directly investigate the impact of new digital technologies on employment is Arntz et al (2018a) They use the direct measure of technological adoption obtained from the same novel linked employer–employee data used in our study to explore the job creation and job destruction channels at the establishment level.
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