The Risk of Automation for Jobs in OECD Countries

In recent years, there has been a revival of concerns that automation and digitalisation might after all result in a jobless future. The debate has been fuelled by studies for the US and Europe arguing that a substantial share of jobs is at “risk of computerisation”. These studies follow an occupation-based approach proposed by Frey and Osborne (2013), i.e. they assume that whole occupations rather than single job-tasks are automated by technology. As we argue, this might lead to an overestimation of job automatibility, as occupations labelled as high-risk occupations often still contain a substantial share of tasks that are hard to automate. Our paper serves two purposes. Firstly, we estimate the job…

• UH
  Universität Heidelberg