{"title":"The employment effects of ICT investment: Evidence from the U.S. Commuting Zones","authors":"Yanchi Zou , Kun Li , Lilong He , Jiapei Guo","doi":"10.1016/j.econmod.2025.107218","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper estimates changes in ICT investment across Commuting Zones (CZs) in the United States from 2008 to 2019 and uses the Bartik instrumental variable method to assess the impact of ICT investment on local employment. The results indicate that ICT investment has a modest yet significantly positive effect on employment. The employment effects vary by industry and ICT type, with notably stronger positive effects for intellectual property-intensive (software-related) ICT investments. Furthermore, ICT investment has the largest positive employment effects in CZs with greater exposure to non-routine tasks, while in CZs with higher exposure to routine tasks, ICT investment exerts negative employment effects. These findings provide new insights into the employment effects of ICT investment in the United States over the past 15 years.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48419,"journal":{"name":"Economic Modelling","volume":"151 ","pages":"Article 107218"},"PeriodicalIF":4.2000,"publicationDate":"2025-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Economic Modelling","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264999325002135","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This paper estimates changes in ICT investment across Commuting Zones (CZs) in the United States from 2008 to 2019 and uses the Bartik instrumental variable method to assess the impact of ICT investment on local employment. The results indicate that ICT investment has a modest yet significantly positive effect on employment. The employment effects vary by industry and ICT type, with notably stronger positive effects for intellectual property-intensive (software-related) ICT investments. Furthermore, ICT investment has the largest positive employment effects in CZs with greater exposure to non-routine tasks, while in CZs with higher exposure to routine tasks, ICT investment exerts negative employment effects. These findings provide new insights into the employment effects of ICT investment in the United States over the past 15 years.
期刊介绍:
Economic Modelling fills a major gap in the economics literature, providing a single source of both theoretical and applied papers on economic modelling. The journal prime objective is to provide an international review of the state-of-the-art in economic modelling. Economic Modelling publishes the complete versions of many large-scale models of industrially advanced economies which have been developed for policy analysis. Examples are the Bank of England Model and the US Federal Reserve Board Model which had hitherto been unpublished. As individual models are revised and updated, the journal publishes subsequent papers dealing with these revisions, so keeping its readers as up to date as possible.