Research themes

Do robots destroy jobs? This has been one of the dominant anxieties of recent years, and a lot of my work has tried to answer this question empirically for Europe. Using data on robot adoption across European regions and sectors, the evidence consistently points in the same direction: there's no significant negative employment effect. In fact, more robotised sectors and countries tend to do better economically. We've also explored how robots affect non-monetary working conditions, and what the potential occupational impact of AI might look like.

The spread of digital tools is probably the most tangible way technology has changed work in practice. With colleagues, I've developed a detailed taxonomy of tasks that tries to capture both what people do at work and how they do it — and how this has been changing. During the COVID-19 pandemic, our work on teleworkability became widely used: we estimated which jobs could be done from home and which couldn't, showing a stark divide across occupations and countries that amounted to a new kind of digital inequality.

Technical teleworkability across EU member states. From Sostero, Fernández-Macías et al. (2020).

This is where I think the most important changes are happening. Digital platforms and algorithmic management aren't just a gig economy phenomenon — they're increasingly spreading into regular workplaces across sectors and occupations. We've been studying this through several large surveys, including the pioneering COLLEEM surveys on platform work and, most recently, the AIM-WORK survey (2024–2025) which covered over 70,000 workers across all 27 EU member states. The data shows that over 90% of EU workers use digital devices at work and a third use AI tools — but that "full platformisation" is associated with worse working conditions, particularly for manual workers.

Which jobs are growing and which are shrinking? And what does this tell us about how economies and societies are changing? Through the European Jobs Monitor and related work, I've been tracking long-term shifts in the employment structure of European countries. The debate has often been framed in terms of job polarisation — a "hollowing out" of the middle — but the European evidence is more nuanced. The dominant pattern has been upgrading rather than polarisation, shaped by demographic change (feminisation, ageing), sectoral dynamics and institutional factors, not just technology.

Job quality is a crucial link between economic performance and well-being — but it's not easy to measure. With colleagues, I've worked on developing multi-dimensional frameworks for measuring and comparing job quality, going beyond wages to include job security, working time, autonomy, skill use, social environment and physical conditions. We've also proposed a detailed taxonomy of job tasks that distinguishes the substantive content of work from its organisational context, which has become useful for analysing how technology changes the nature of work.

I've done quite a bit of work on wage and income inequality in Europe, with a focus on the EU as a whole — looking at both within-country and between-country dynamics. A key finding is that before 2008, there was a strong process of wage convergence between EU countries that was significantly reducing EU-wide inequality. The Great Recession broke this trend, with very unequal impacts across countries and income groups. My work also looks at how occupational structures, labour market segmentation and institutions shape wage distributions.