Does robotization affect job quality? Evidence from European regional labor markets.

Whereas there are recent papers on the effect of robot adoption on employment and wages, there is no evidence on how robots affect non-monetary working conditions. We explore the impact of robot adoption on several domains of non-monetary working conditions in Europe over the period 1995-2005 combining information from the World Robotics Survey and the European Working Conditions Survey. In order to deal with the possible endogeneity of robot deployment, we employ an instrumental variables strategy, using the robot exposure by sector in other developed countries as an instrument.

Effects of health care decentralization in Spain from a citizens' perspective.

The aim of this article is to analyze the impact of the decentralization of the public national health system in Spain on citizens' satisfaction with different dimensions of primary and hospital care. Using micro-data from the Health Barometer 1996-2009 and taking advantage of the exogeneity of the different pace of decentralization across Spain using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that, in general, decentralization has not improved citizens' satisfaction with different features of the health services. In our base model, we find that there are even some small negative effects on a subset of variables.