0000000000448786

AUTHOR

Antonio Francesco Gravina

0000-0001-9509-8343

Do robots complement or substitute for older workers?

Abstract The impact of robotization on labor market outcomes has been recently empirically investigated along several directions, including employment, wages and labor productivity. This work contributes to this literature by looking for heterogeneous effects of robots on the workforce, analyzed by age cohorts. Relying on a panel of data from IFR (2019) and EU KLEMS (2009) over the years 1994–2005, we find consistent evidence of higher complementarity between robots and older workers (hours worked by employees aged 50 and over), and a greater substitutability among robots and younger cohorts of the labor market. These findings are robust to age group disaggregation and specific capital pric…

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School-age vaccination, school openings and Covid-19 diffusion

This article investigates the relationship between school openings and Covid-19 diffusion when school-age vaccination becomes available. The analysis relies on a unique geo-referenced high frequency database on age of vaccination, Covid-19 cases and hospitalization indicators from the Italian region of Sicily. The study focuses on the change of Covid-19 diffusion after school opening in a homogeneous geographical territory (i.e., with the same control measures and surveillance systems, centrally coordinated by the Regional Government). The identification of causal effects derives from a comparison of the change in cases before and after school opening in the school year 2020/21, when vaccin…

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Finance, globalisation, technology and inequality: Do nonlinearities matter?

Abstract Relying on data for 90 economies over 1970-2015 and panel estimation techniques, we investigate how financial development, globalisation and technology affect income inequality. Our findings reveal significant nonlinearities, consistent with either Ushaped or inverted-U shaped relationships. As such, depending on whether a certain threshold value is achieved, the same determinants of income distribution exert opposite effects in different countries. Globalisation is associated with increasing inequality in most advanced economies, but with falling disparities for the large majority of emerging economies. Technology and financial development lead to increasing inequality for most em…

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Dinamiche della disuguaglianza e della robotizzazione: Un'analisi longitudinale

Il crescente trend di automazione dei processi produttivi sta alimentando non poche preoccupazioni circa la possibilità che, in un futuro non troppo remoto, una quota rilevante di lavori tradizionali sarà rimpiazzata tout-court dai robot o dall’intelligenza artificiale, esacerbando, conseguentemente, le disuguaglianze. Con particolare riferimento all’impatto dei robot su svariati indicatori del mercato del lavoro, la letteratura empirica, attualmente, si è rivelata infruttuosa nel fornire risposte definitive ed esaustive, producendo evidenze contrastanti. Il presente contributo si inserisce nel dibattito in corso, proponendo un’indagine sulle dinamiche della robotizzazione e delle disparità…

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Are robots in rich countries a threat for employment in emerging economies?

The effects of robotization on labor market outcomes have been widely investigated within developed countries. Conversely, few studies have tried to assess how automation in advanced economies affects less industrialized countries. In this work, we analyze the impact of robotization in a group of developed European countries (EU15) on employment dynamics in a country-industry panel data of emerging markets. Our findings indicate that EU15 robotization is associated with a decline of sectoral employment in emerging economies, especially in Asia, tradable and more robotized industries. Ultimately, a small set of major European countries - namely, Germany, Italy, Denmark and United Kingdom - s…

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