We received an invitation to participate in a workshop on methods in economics organized by our friends at the University of Economics and Businesses. The workshop was a perfect combination of a showdown of less frequently used methods in the analysis of economic problems and a discussion of PhD dissertations. We discussed there our paper on automation and the workers' careers. As we al know, automation changed much of how we do stuff, creating and destroying jobs alike. In this article, we wonder whether jobs potentially more exposed to automation had worse career outcomes, in particular whether they experienced more job transitions and whether these transitions were to different occupations. In order to analyze these concepts together we use optimal matching, a tool that allows to look at the entire career of workers. The results suggest that people in occupations with more exposure to automation had relatively worse outcomes (longer unemployment spells, more job switching), but the effects were economically small.

We than the organizers for putting together such a nice workshop, and the participants for the insightful suggestions. Hopefully, we can incorporate them to the next iterations of the paper.