ABSTRACT
This study investigates the impact of technological change on unemployment in China’s labour market based on a recent panel data of 283 prefectural-level cities from 2010 to 2017. The results obtained by the system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM-SYS) estimation show that massive adoption of robots is a significant driving force raising unemployment rate while there is a reverse change in the longer period; the insignificant estimates of utility patent and its lagged terms indicate the weak and non-persistent relationship between unemployment and patent-related innovation.
Disclosure statement
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
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Notes
1 Specific descriptions and summary statistics for variables used in this paper are displayed in the appendix, Table A1.