Femke Cnossen

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About

Femke Cnossen is a leading researcher at the intersection of labor economics, technology, and worker well-being. Her work critically examines how robotization and new technologies reshape not only wages and tasks, but also the fundamental human experience of work. Cnossen’s most influential contribution is her pioneering 2024 paper, “Robots, meaning, and self-determination,” which is the first to empirically link workplace automation to workers’ sense of meaningfulness, autonomy, competence, and relatedness—core components of motivation and well-being. Analyzing survey data across 14 industries in 20 European countries from 2005 to 2021, her findings have garnered 48 citations, signaling a major impact on the field. She further advances this agenda by providing a worker-level view of how robotization alters task composition, and by using unique Dutch administrative data to show how nonroutine abstract and interactive tasks command wage premiums. Cnossen’s work is notable for its rare focus on the psychological costs of technological change, offering a crucial counterpoint to purely productivity-based analyses. Her research is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the future of work in an age of intelligent machines.