IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ssa/lemwps/2025-19.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

European regional employment and exposure to labour-saving technical change: results from a direct text similarity measure

Author

Listed:
  • Federico Riccio
  • Jacopo Staccioli
  • Maria Enrica Virgillito

Abstract

Does labour-saving technological change pose a threat to European employment, and if so, to what extent? This study investigates the degree of employment exposure to labour-saving technological change across NUTS-2 regions in Europe. We construct a cross-walked metric between the SOC and ISCO classification systems to adapt the direct measure of occupational exposure developed by Montobbio et al. (2024) for the US economy and apply it to the European context. This methodology enables us to generate detailed insights into the exposure of European occupations by leveraging the similarity rankings between technological classifications in the USPTO (CPCs) and task descriptions. To evaluate the transmission from occupational exposure to employment outcomes, we utilise data from the European Structure of Earnings Survey (EU-SES), thereby constructing exposure indices at both sectoral and regional levels. Finally, we examine the industrial and geographical diffusion of labour-saving technological change in recent years and provide robust econometric evidence indicating that low-wage regions, as well as deindustrialising areas heavily integrated into global value chains, are disproportionately vulnerable to the threat of substitution.

Suggested Citation

  • Federico Riccio & Jacopo Staccioli & Maria Enrica Virgillito, 2025. "European regional employment and exposure to labour-saving technical change: results from a direct text similarity measure," LEM Papers Series 2025/19, Laboratory of Economics and Management (LEM), Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy.
  • Handle: RePEc:ssa:lemwps:2025/19
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.lem.sssup.it/WPLem/files/2025-19.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    regional disparities; manufacturing downgrading; automation; global value chains;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ssa:lemwps:2025/19. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge The email address of this maintainer does not seem to be valid anymore. Please ask the person in charge to update the entry or send us the correct address (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/labssit.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.