Elisabetta Gentile

Asian Institute of Management, Asian Development Bank

Papers

Total Citations

218

H-Index

About

Elisabetta Gentile is an economist whose research sits at the cutting edge of labor economics, technological change, and the future of work. She is best known for her influential investigation into how industrial automation reshapes labor markets across diverse economic contexts. Her landmark study, "The Rise of Robots and the Fall of Routine Jobs" (2020), has garnered over 200 citations and stands as a significant contribution to our understanding of automation's uneven effects on employment. Drawing on data from 37 countries spanning 2005 to 2015, Gentile and her collaborators demonstrate that increased robot adoption is strongly associated with a declining employment share of routine manual jobs — but critically, this relationship holds primarily in high-income economies rather than in emerging market and transition economies. By leveraging cross-industry variation in technical feasibility as an analytical tool, her work brings methodological rigor to a field of growing policy relevance. Gentile's research is particularly valuable for policymakers and scholars grappling with inequality in the age of automation, offering nuanced, cross-country evidence that challenges one-size-fits-all narratives about technological displacement.