{"title":"Technical change and automation of routine tasks: Evidence from local labour markets in France, 1999‑2011","authors":"P. Charnoz, M. Orand","doi":"10.24187/ECOSTAT.2017.497D.1933","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"In France as well as in other developed economies, a skill-biased labour demand shift occurred in the past three decades. We test one of the main hypotheses put forward to explain this particular shift : a skill-biased technical change driven by the dissemination of Information and Communication Technologies and the automation of routine tasks, leading to their disappearance in favour of high-skilled and service jobs. Using a theoretical model developed by Autor and Dorn (2013) based on the employment structure of local labour markets to identify national effects of technical change, we find evidence of a link between technical change and the 1990-2011 evolution of the labour force in France. In particular, we find that low-skilled workers switch from routine jobs to service jobs or unemployment. We also find that the shift in labour demand interacts with a spatial functional specialisation. These results are robust when other hypotheses, such as globalisation and the growth of international trade, or demographic change, are taken into account.","PeriodicalId":38830,"journal":{"name":"Economie et Statistique","volume":"497 1","pages":"103-122"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2018-02-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"11","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Economie et Statistique","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.24187/ECOSTAT.2017.497D.1933","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"Social Sciences","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 11
Abstract
In France as well as in other developed economies, a skill-biased labour demand shift occurred in the past three decades. We test one of the main hypotheses put forward to explain this particular shift : a skill-biased technical change driven by the dissemination of Information and Communication Technologies and the automation of routine tasks, leading to their disappearance in favour of high-skilled and service jobs. Using a theoretical model developed by Autor and Dorn (2013) based on the employment structure of local labour markets to identify national effects of technical change, we find evidence of a link between technical change and the 1990-2011 evolution of the labour force in France. In particular, we find that low-skilled workers switch from routine jobs to service jobs or unemployment. We also find that the shift in labour demand interacts with a spatial functional specialisation. These results are robust when other hypotheses, such as globalisation and the growth of international trade, or demographic change, are taken into account.