Max Nathan (UCL)

SEMINAR POSTPONED

The New Wave? Technology diffusion in the UK during the 2010s

Abstact. A new wave of general-purpose technologies has emerged in the past decade. These technologies – such as cloud and machine learning/artificial intelligence – are held to be central for productivity and long-run economic growth, as well as driving regional disparities. The adoption of these technologies will be critical in shaping their future economic impact. In this paper we a) show that diffusion is associated with area-level productivity differences, and b) combine rich job ads data and administrative sources to track and explain the diffusion of these ‘new wave’ technologies across UK firms and places over the 2010s. We focus on a specific economically and policy-relevant margin of diffusion: hiring. We first identify cloud and ML/AI jobs from ad text using keywords from Bloom et al (2021). We validate firm-level hiring~adoption links using administrative survey data. We next explore patterns of hiring, and test for adoption drivers at firm and area level, including the relative roles of firm, industry and area characteristics; historic complements; and past technology waves. We use control functions and other methods to mitigate endogeneity concerns.

Joint with Mirko Draca, Viet Nguyen, Juliana Oliveira-Cunha, Anna Rosso, Anna Valero and Shengxing Zhan.