Nicole Woessner

Papers

Total Citations

677

H-Index

About

Nicole Woessner is a labor and industrial economist whose research sits at the intersection of automation, technological change, and labor market dynamics. She is best known for her pioneering work examining how industrial robots reshape employment and firm structures, with a particular focus on the German and broader European economic context. Her most influential contribution, "The Adjustment of Labor Markets to Robots" (2021), has garnered over 500 citations and offers a nuanced portrait of automation's effects: while robots displace manufacturing workers, the resulting job losses are fully offset by new service-sector employment, challenging more alarmist narratives about technological unemployment. This finding was foreshadowed in her earlier 2018 paper, which similarly found neutral aggregate employment effects at the local labor market level while documenting important compositional shifts in wages and job types. More recently, Woessner has turned her attention to firm-level consequences of robotization, investigating how automation technologies contribute to the rise of "superstar firms" — dominant companies that capture disproportionate shares of sales, productivity gains, and profits within European industries. Together, her body of work provides essential empirical grounding for policy debates around automation, inequality, and the future of work.