Research about the Covid-19 pandemic has taken center stage in shaping the work of many scholars, inter alia highlighting the importance of research in addressing the grand challenges humanity faces. However, the pandemic has also ushered in increased administrative, teaching and out of work commitments for many researchers, leading to concerns that academics will become less willing to invest time in obtaining resources to undertake non-Covid-related projects. Using a large-scale survey of business, economics and management researchers, coupled with their publication histories and additional institutional data, we examine how far individuals experienced the focus on the pandemic as ‘crowding out’ interest in, and undermining their confidence in applying for grants for work not focused on the pandemic. We found 40% of the sample agree that the pandemic has impaired their confidence in applying for non-pandemic-related grants and ‘crowded out’ other projects. Researchers with current and prior grants, particularly those with the most experience of holding grants, scholars whose work ‘impacted’ beyond academia, and early career researchers, disproportionately considered themselves to be most affected. We also found that researchers’ perceptions differed based on institutional characteristics. We discuss the implications of these findings for grant providers and national research agencies as well as for individual academic researchers and the institutions in which they work.

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In spite of the fast spread of Additive Manufacturing (AM) in several countries and industries, its impact on employment is still unexplored and theoretically ambiguous. On the one hand, higher product customization and shorter time-to-market entail an expansion of the market, thus fostering labour demand; on the other hand, AM profoundly changes the way goods are produced and little evidence exists regarding the complementarity or substitutability between AM technologies and labour.In this article, we contribute to fill this gap. Namely, we estimate labour demand functions augmented with a (patent-based) proxy of AM-related innovation in 31 OECD countries, across 21 manufacturing industries, over the 2009-2017 period. Our econometric findings show an overall positive relationship between AM technologies and employment at the industry level, due to both market expansion and complementarity between labour and AM technologies, while no labour-saving effect emerges. The importance of each mechanism, however, is heterogeneous across sectors.

The investigation of the adoption of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) technologies and its implications, both at the macro and micro level, has attracted growing interest in the recent literature. Most studies have looked at the production and diffusion of related innovations and knowledge, but what do we know about the adoption of these technologies over time and across countries? In this paper, we look at three I4.0 technologies and present a new empirical perspective able to overcome the limitations of existing attempts at measuring their adoption, generally based on small-scale and country-specific studies. Our study provides a methodology that allows measuring adoption across countries for a relatively long time period. In so doing, we build on the well-established idea in the international economics literature that trade of capital goods captures technology diffusion, and so adoption across countries. We provide preliminary and comprehensive evidence on the adoption of these I4.0 technologies in Europe and set the premise for monitoring its evolution and implications on a large scale and over time.

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