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The present technological revolution, characterized by the pervasive and growing presence of robots, automation, Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, is going to transform societies and economic systems. However, this is not the first technological revolution humankind has been facing, but it is probably the very first one with such an accelerated diffusion pace involving all the industrial sectors. Studying its mechanisms and consequences (will the world turn into a jobless society or not?), mainly considering the labor market dynamics, is a crucial matter. This paper aims at providing an updated picture of main empirical evidence on the relationship between new technologies and employment both in terms of overall consequences on the number of employees, tasks required, and wage/inequality effect.

The present technological revolution, characterized by the pervasive and growing presence of robots, automation, Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, is going to transform societies and economic systems. However, this is not the first technological revolution humankind has been facing, but it is probably the very first one with such an accelerated diffusion pace involving all the industrial sectors. Studying its mechanisms and consequences (will the world turn into a jobless society or not?), mainly considering the labor market dynamics, is a crucial matter. This paper aims at providing an updated picture of main empirical evidence on the relationship between new technologies and employment both in terms of overall consequences on the number of employees, tasks required, and wage/inequality effect.

Using a unique firm-level database comprising the top European R&D investors over the period 2002-2013 and running LSDVC estimates, this study finds a significant labour-friendly impact of R&D expenditures. However, this positive employment effect appears limited in magnitude and entirely due to the medium-and high-tech sectors, while no effect can be detected in the low-tech industries. From a policy point of view, this outcome is supporting the EU2020 strategy, but - taking into account that most European economies are specialised in low-tech activities - is also worrying in terms of future perspectives of the European labour market.

Using a unique firm-level database comprising the top European R&D investors over the period 2002-2013 and running LSDVC estimates, this study finds a significant labourfriendly impact of R&D expenditures. However, this positive employment effect appears limited in magnitude and entirely due to the medium-and high-tech sectors, while no effect can be detected in the low-tech industries. From a policy point of view, this outcome is supporting the EU2020 strategy, but - taking into account that most of European economies are specialized in low-tech activities - is also worrying in terms of future perspectives of the European labour market.

In this work, we test the employment impact of distinct types of innovative investments using a representative sample of Spanish manufacturing firms over the period 2002-2013. Our GMM-SYS estimates generate various results, which are partially in contrast with the extant literature. Indeed, estimations carried out on the entire sample do not provide statistically significant evidence of the expected labor-friendly nature of innovation. More in detail, neither R&D nor investment in innovative machineries and equipment (the so-called embodied technological change, ETC) turn out to have any significant employment effect. However, the job-creation impact of R&D expenditures becomes highly significant when the focus is limited to the high-tech firms. On the other hand and interestingly ETC exhibits its labor-saving nature when SMEs are singled out.

Using a unique firm-level database comprising the top European R&D investors over the period 2002-2013 and running LSDVC estimates, this study finds a significant labour-friendly impact of R&D expenditures. However, this positive employment effect appears limited in magnitude and entirely due to the medium-and high-tech sectors, while no effect can be detected in the low-tech industries. From a policy point of view, this outcome is supporting the EU2020 strategy, but taking into account that most of European economies are specialized in low-tech activities is also worrying in terms of future perspectives of the European labour market.

The aim of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, the economic insights about the employment impact of technological change are disentangled starting from the classical economists to nowadays theoretical and empirical analyses. On the other hand, an empirical test is provided; in particular, longitudinal data covering manufacturing and service sectors over the 1998-2011 period for 11 European countries are used to run GMM-SYS and LSDVC estimates. Two are the main results: 1) a significant labour-friendly impact of R&D expenditures (mainly related to product innovation) is found; yet, this positive employment effect appears to be entirely due to the medium-and high-tech sectors, while no effect can be detected in the low-tech industries; 2) capital formation is found to be negatively related to employment; this outcome points to a possible labour-saving effect due to the embodied technological change incorporated in gross investment (mainly related to process innovation).

This paper explores the employment impact of innovation activity, taking into account both R&D expenditures and embodied technological change (ETC). We use a novel panel dataset covering 265 innovative Italian firms over the period 1998-2010. The main outcome from the proposed fixed effect estimations is a labor-friendly nature of total innovation expenditures; however, this positive effect is barely significant when the sole in-house R&D expenditures are considered and fades away when ETC is included as a proxy for innovation activities. Moreover, the positive employment impacts of innovation activities and R&D expenditures are totally due to firms operating in high-tech industries and large companies, while no job-creation due to technical change is detectable in traditional sectors and SMEs.

In this paper we assess the job creation effect of R&D expenditures, using a unique longitudinal database of 677 European companies over the period 1990-2008. We estimate a dynamic labour demand specification using a Least Squares Dummy Variable Corrected (LSDVC) technique. The labour-friendly nature of R&D emerges from the empirical analysis on the overall sample. However, this positive significant effect corresponds to the high-tech sector and services, while the effect is not significant for traditional manufacturing. The results support the policy agenda of promoting structural change in European economies.

After discussing theory regarding the consequences of technological change on employment and surveying previous microeconometric literature, our aim with this paper is to test the possible job creation effect of business R&D expenditures, using a unique longitudinal database covering 677 European manufacturing and service firms over the period 1990-2008. The main outcome from the whole sample dynamic LSDVC (Least Squared Dummy Variable Corrected) estimate is the labour-friendly nature of companies' R&D, the coefficient of which turns out to be statistically significant, although not very large in magnitude. However, the positive and significant impact of R&D expenditures on employment is detectable in services and high-tech manufacturing but absent in the more traditional manufacturing sectors. This means that we should not expect positive employment effects from increasing R&D in the majority of industrial sectors. This is something that should be borne in mind by European innovation policy makers having employment as one of their specific aims.

The microeconomic empirical literature devoted to the link between innovation and employment tends to suggest that technological change has a positive effect on jobs, at least at the level of the firm. The main purpose of this paper is to see whether this result still holds in a situation where intermediate technologies are implemented mainly through gross innovative investments, as in Italian manufacturing. Applying GMM-SYS to an employment equation augmented for technology and using a unique longitudinal dataset of 575 Italian manufacturing firms over the period 1992-1997, this paper finds a significant - although small in size - positive relationship between innovation and employment. While the links with sales and wages have the expected signs and turn out to be significant, the job creating impact of innovation proves robust after checking for time, industry, firm's size and geographical fixed effects.