Automation technologies and their impact on employment: A review, synthesis and future research agenda

This paper aims to review prior studies investigating how automation technologies affect employment. Our structured systematic review resulted in 102 publications recovered from Web of Science, Scopus and hand searching. The literature investigating how automation technologies affect employment is extremely complex and detailed, given that the impact of automation is evaluated at different levels of analysis (i.e., global, international, continental, country, regional, labour market, industry, firm, occupational, worker, and work activities) by adopting alternative methods (i.e., estimating the probability of automation or the net impact of employment) and, for some levels of analysis, the impact of each specific type of automation technology is evaluated. Moreover, the results are often inconsistent and inconclusive since only few clear results emerge and the impact of automation technologies is unclear for many levels of analysis. Research gaps and future research agenda are identified and discussed based on previous evidence.