A paper co-authored by WeLaR researcher Fabrizio Pompei has been published in Industry and Innovation Journal.
In the paper, “Robots, skills and temporary jobs: evidence from six European countries,” Pompei, together with Mirella Damiani and Alfred Kleinknecht, analyses the impact of robot adoption on the use of flexible contracts in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK.
The authors found that in a “high knowledge cumulativeness” innovation regime, robot adoption reduces the probability that high-skilled workers will receive temporary contracts. At the same time, automatisation did not significantly impact the situation of lo and medium-skilled workers.
The research shows that the situation is different in “low-cumulativeness” regimes. Such companies mainly use externally acquired knowledge in their innovation process. That 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, DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1080/13662716.2022.2156851
