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This paper deals with the complex relationship between innovation and the labor market, analyzing the impact of new technological advancements on overall employment, skills and wages. After a critical review of the extant literature and the available empirical studies, novel evidence is presented on the distribution of labor-saving automation (namely robotics and AI), based on natural language processing of US patents. This mapping shows that both upstream high-tech providers and downstream users of new technologies - such as Boeing and Amazon - lead the underlying innovative effort.

The recent surge of patent disputes plays an important role in discouraging firms from entering new technology domains (TDs). Using a large-scale dataset combining data from the EPO-PATSTAT database and ORBIS-IP and containing patents applied at EPO between 2000 and 2015, we construct a new measure of litigiousness using patent opposition data. We find that the degree of litigiousness and the density of patent thickets negatively affect the likelihood of firms entering new TDs. Across technologies, the frequency of oppositions discourages firms mostly in high-tech industries. Across firms, the risk of opposition falls disproportionately on small rather than large firms. Finally, for large firms, we observe a sort of learning-by-being-opposed effect. This evidence suggests that litigiousness and hold-up potential discourage firms from entering new TDs, shaping Schumpeterian patterns of innovation characterized by a stable number of large-established firms and a lower degree of turbulence.

This paper investigates the impact of investment in automation- and AI- related goods on within-firm wage inequality in the French economy during the period 2002-2017. We document that most of wage inequality in France is accounted for by differences among workers belonging to the same firm, rather than by differences between sectors, firms, and occupations. Using an event-study approach on a sample of firms importing automation and AI-related goods, we find that spike events related to the adoption of automation- or AI-related capital goods are not followed by an increase in within-firm wage nor in gender inequality. Instead, wages increase by 1% three years after the events at different percentiles of the distribution. Our findings are not linked to a rent-sharing behavior of firms obtaining productivity gains from automation or AI adoption. Instead, if the wage gains do not differ across workers along the wage distribution, worker heterogeneity is still present. Indeed, aligned with the framework in Abowd et al. (1999b), most of the overall wage increase is due to the hiring of new employees. This adds to previous findings showing picture of a ‘labor friendly’ effect of the latest wave of new technologies within adopting firms.

This paper investigates how investment in automation-intensive goods impacts on worker flows at the firm level and, within firms, across occupational categories. Resorting to an integrated dataset encompassing detailed information on firms, their imports, and employer-employee data for French manufacturing employers over 2002-2015, we identify "automation spikes" using imports of intermediates embedding automation technologies and then test their impact on employment dynamics. We find that automation spikes are positively correlated with preceding and contemporaneous growth in employment, mainly due to lower separation rates of investing firms. These differential patterns of net and gross worker flows do not appear to change significantly across different types of workers (occupational categories, "techies", routine-intensive vs. non routine-intensive jobs).

This paper investigates the determinants of export behavior among Indian manufacturing firms, focusing in particular on the role of technology, cost and imported intermediate inputs. Our evidence suggests that innovation, in particular R&D, positively affects both firms' probability to export and firms' export volumes. We also find that imported intermediate inputs, incorporating foreign technology, play an important role in expanding export activities of firms. On the other hand, we find that higher productivity or lower unit labour costs are not systematically associated with the probability to enter export market, but they do positively affect export volumes.