Disasters and technological upgrading measured by changes in demand for ICT labour: estimating the impacts with text

Campos Gonzalez, J. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7348-1827 (2025) Disasters and technological upgrading measured by changes in demand for ICT labour: estimating the impacts with text. Natural Hazards, 121 (1). pp. 911-957. ISSN 1573-0840 doi: 10.1007/s11069-024-06863-z

Abstract/Summary

Extensive literature has studied the economic impact of disasters. However, specific impacts on labour markets have received less attention. Using a massive earthquake (> 8.0 Mw) that struck Chile in 2010 and proprietary data from a Chilean online job board (4136 job postings published between 2008 and 2012), we examine changes in demand for Information and Communications Technologies, ICT, related labour as a proxy for technological upgrading, by assuming that ICT and related technologies drive much of the technical change in production. We implement a structural topic model to discover and estimate the difference in the prevalence of ICT and Construction labour, among others. Our results show that ICT labour does not change. In contrast, Construction labour significantly differed after the disaster, suggesting that reconstruction activities led to employment differences. Our results suggest that there was no substantive technological replacement following the earthquake.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/117627
Identification Number/DOI	10.1007/s11069-024-06863-z
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Life Sciences > School of Agriculture, Policy and Development > Department of Agri-Food Economics & Marketing
Publisher	Springer
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