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About

Jens Suedekum is a leading labor economist whose research sits at the intersection of automation, technological change, and labor market dynamics, with a particular focus on the German and European economies. He is best known for his pioneering empirical work on the effects of industrial robots on employment and wages, leveraging rich administrative data to produce some of the most rigorous evidence in this rapidly growing field. His 2021 study on labor market adjustment to robots, now cited over 500 times, delivered a landmark finding: while robot adoption displaces manufacturing jobs, these losses are fully offset by employment growth in services — a nuanced result that reshaped debates about automation and job destruction. Complementary worker-level research published in 2018 further refined our understanding of how local labor markets absorb technological shocks. More recently, Suedekum has extended his lens to firm-level dynamics, examining how robotization contributes to the rise of "superstar firms" — highly productive, high-markup enterprises that increasingly dominate European industries. Through both academic scholarship and accessible policy writing in German, he has become an influential voice informing how governments should respond to digitalization without overstating the threat of mass unemployment.