Attitudes towards Digitalization and Automatization in the Labor Market.

The implications of digitaization and automatization for the labor market and employment are heavily debated, both in the public and among academics. While some of the press coverage leaves the impression that the demand for human work will substantially decrease as a response to automatization and digitalization, some recent academic work finds evidence that automatization and digitalization increase overall human employment but have distributional consequences. In light of the public and academic debate, we study attitudes towards digitalization and automatization using a large-scall representative survey with experimental components in Germany and the US.

We survey many different attitudes, opinions, information and perceived employment threats in the context of recent developments in the labor market. We also ask for potential policy implications, attitudes towards redistribution and have a real behavioral outcome variable where we offer the actual possibility to donate money for charity. One aim of our study therefore is to gain a detailed picture of the perceptions in the context of the topic among the general public. We also include a randomized component into the survey where we manipulate the level of information about the topic. The information treatments confront participants with the results of a recent academic paper by Graetz and Michaels (2018, ReStat). This experimental component aims at studying whether biased information about the topic change attitudes and perceptions. An additional randomized component varies the order along which our questions are presented: we sometimes first ask general questions whereas sometimes we first ask specific questions about automatization and digitalization. This component helps to study if the general awareness of the topic changes partcioants' perceptions.