This study investigates the barriers that hinder the non-leading Brazilian higher education institutions (HEIs) in repositioning within the digital landscape based on dynamic capabilities. In-depth semi-structured interviews with top managers at six non-leading HEIs show that the main barriers include uncertainty about the traditional HEI future in the digital scenario, lack of strategic tools to reposition the HEIs, lack of knowledge about the cost-benefit of an institution’s digitization, lack of knowledge on how to implement changes, and lack of information on if an HEI should (or not) meet all the new stakeholder needs. These barriers prevent HEIs from successfully adapting to the digital era. Methodologies and tools are required to guide strategic decisions, perform digitization’s cost-benefit analysis, and implement changes that meet stakeholders’ evolving demands. By overcoming these barriers, HEIs can effectively implement dynamic capabilities, transforming the challenges of the digital age into opportunities for growth and innovation.

The higher-educated were long supposed to be winners of technological change, but recent evidence indicates that they feel (and are) increasingly exposed to the risk of technological redundancy. Based on what is known about how lower- to medium-skilled workers respond to technological exposure, this new sense of vulnerability among the higher-educated could have significant political effects – specifically increased support for right-wing populist parties – but empirical evidence on this is still lacking. I address this gap and investigate the effects of technological vulnerability on the party preferences of the higher-educated using survey data from the 2022 Risks that Matter survey. I find that feeling technologically vulnerable does indeed increase support for populist right-wing parties and reduce support for left parties among the higher-educated. I also conduct mediation analyses to explore the mechanisms behind these patterns and find evidence for a significant but substantively small mediation effect of social policy preferences.

A balanced growth path that accounts for a decline in hours worked per worker approximates the evolution of today’s industrialized countries since 1870. This stylized fact is explained in an overlapping generations (OLG) model featuring two-period lived individuals equipped with per-period utility functions of the generalized log-log type proposed by Boppart and Krusell (2020) and a neoclassical production sector. Technological progress drives real wages up and expands the amount of consumption goods. The value of leisure increases, and the supply of hours worked declines. Technological progress moves a poor economy out of a regime with low wages and an inelastic supply of hours worked into a regime with high wages and a declining supply of hours worked. The balanced growth path is unique and stable. In the high wage regime, the equilibrium difference equation is available in closed form. A balanced growth path with declining hours worked may also be obtained with endogenous technological progress as in Romer (1986).

Societies are experiencing deep and intertwined structural changes that may unsettle perceptions European citizens have of their economic and employment security. In turn, such perceptions likely alter people’s political positions. For instance, those worried by labour market competition may prefer greater social protection to compensate for the accrued risk, or prefer more closed economies where external borders provide protection (or perceived protection). We develop expectations about how such distinct reactions can emerge from distinct labour-market risks of globalization, or automation, or migration. We test these expectations using a conjoint experiment in 13 European countries on European-level social policy. Results broadly corroborate our expectations on how different concerns about sources of labour market competition yield support for different features of European-level social policy.

Does providing information about the costs and benefits of automation affect the perceived fairness of a firm's decision to automate or support for government policies addressing automation's labor market consequences? To answer these questions, we use data from vignette and conjoint experiments across four advanced economies (Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US). Our results show that despite people's relatively fixed policy preferences, their evaluation of the fairness of automation—and therefore potentially the issue's political salience—is sensitive to information about its trade-offs, especially information about price changes attributable to automated labor. This suggests that the political impact of automation may depend on how it is framed by the media and political actors.

The recent change towards advanced technologies favors skill-intensive labor, motivating workers to upgrade their educational achievements to the tertiary level. However, workers in many developing countries cannot exploit the opportunity for premium wages in skill-intensive sectors owing to insufficient education facilities and resources. In such contexts, aid to education provides a capacity-building tool to eliminate the insufficiency but is often unsuccessful. Using theories of trade and human capital, this study argues that complementarity between education aid and skill-intensive manufactured exports creates a synergistic effect in upgrading educational achievements by rectifying both structural and incentive constraints. Through extensive data analysis, the result demonstrates that skill-intensive exports enhance aid's effectiveness in increasing tertiary school enrollment, whereas neither exports nor aid alone significantly affect enrollment. It further shows that the aid–export complementarity is less relevant in low-income countries, whereas skill-intensive exports alone promote education upgrading in developed countries via the Stolper–Samuelson effect.

Does technological change fuel political disruption? Drawing on fine-grained labor market data from Germany, this paper examines how technological change affects regional electorates. We first show that the well-known decline in manufacturing and routine jobs in regions with higher robot adoption or investment in information and communication technology (ICT) was more than compensated by parallel employment growth in the service sector and cognitive non-routine occupations. This change in the regional composition of the workforce has important political implications: Workers trained for these new sectors typically hold progressive political values and support progressive pro-system parties. Overall, this composition effect dominates the politically perilous direct effect of automation-induced substitution. As a result, technology-adopting regions are unlikely to turn into populist-authoritarian strongholds.

This historical paper analyses the distributional consequences of computerisation on the wage share of income in United Kingdom (UK) workplaces in the first decade of this century. The reasons why computerisation might increase a firm’s income but reduce the share assigned to wages are still not well understood. The uniquely rich Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) 2004–2011 includes firm-level measures of the main production inputs and outputs, and thus allows an analysis of the main mechanisms through which increased computer usage influenced the wage share of income in UK workplaces over this period. This analysis shows that the proportion of employees using computers impacted the wage share in ways that were at odds with two mainstream views: that computers complement capital, and that labour can be easily replaced by capital. The results show that the proportion of employees using computers reduced the wage share by disproportionally increasing the productivity of the least skilled employees, who were not proportionally compensated for their increase in productivity. The stability of the wage share, over the period of interest, is explained by the rise in a workplace’s share of professional employees and by a rise in work effort. This positive contribution to the wage share was counteracted by an increased share of employees using computers and by a reduction in the share of employees whose pay was negotiated by unions, thereby contributing to a decline in the wage share of firm income.

The race to develop and implement autonomous systems and artificial intelligence has challenged the responsiveness of governments in many areas and none more so than in the domain of labour market policy. This article draws upon a large survey of Singaporean employees and managers (N = 332) conducted in 2019 to examine the extent and ways in which artificial intelligence and autonomous technologies have begun impacting workplaces in Singapore. Our conclusions reiterate the need for government intervention to facilitate broad-based participation in the productivity benefits of fourth industrial revolution technologies while also offering re-designed social safety nets and employment protections.

Which tasks workers perform in their jobs is critical for how technological change plays out in the labour market. This article critically reviews existing measures of occupational task content and makes the case for rethinking how this concept is operationalised. It identifies serious shortcomings relating to the theoretical content and the empirical implementation of existing measures. Based on survey data from European Union countries between 2000 and 2015, it then introduces novel measures of routine task intensity and task complexity at the International Standard Classification of Occupations 1988 two-digit level that address these shortcomings. The indices will contribute to a more theoretically informed understanding of technological change and benefit both labour economists and sociologists in investigating the nature of recent technological change.

We measure the economic impact of varietal improvement and technological change in flue-cured tobacco across quantity (e.g., yield) and quality dimensions under a voluntary quality constraint. Since 1961, flue-cured tobacco breeders in the United States have been subject to the Minimum Standards Program that sets limits on acceptable quality characteristics for commercial tobacco varieties. We implement a Bayesian hierarchical model to measure the contribution of breeding efforts to changes in tobacco yields and quality between 1954 and 2017. The Bayesian model addresses limited data for varieties in the trials and allows easy generation of the necessary parameters of economic interest.