In recent years, there has been growing concern in Europe about the lack of an established comparable measure of job quality to complement the widely accepted quantitative indicators in the formulation and evaluation of European employment policies. The aim of this paper is to offer a guided tour around the different views and existing proposals of job quality indicators, mainly from a European perspective. First, we discuss the methodological decisions that have to be made in the process of designing an indicator of job quality, from both a theoretical and methodological/technical perspective. Second, these arguments are used to discuss critically the different empirical approaches to the measurement of job quality proposed in the literature. We finish by presenting some recommendations for the construction of a job quality index for policy purposes.

Whereas there are recent papers on the effect of robot adoption on employment and wages, there is no evidence on how robots affect non‐monetary working conditions. We explore the impact of robot adoption on several domains of non‐monetary working conditions in Europe over the period 1995–2005 combining information from the World Robotics Survey and the European Working Conditions Survey. In order to deal with the possible endogeneity of robot deployment, we employ an instrumental variables strategy, using the robot exposure by sector in other developed countries as an instrument. Our results indicate that robotization has a negative impact on the quality of work in the dimension of work intensity and no relevant impact on the domains of physical environment or skills and discretion.

This paper explores the impact of robot adoption on European regional labour markets between 1995 and 2015. Specifically, we look at the effect of the usage of industrial robots on jobs and employment structures across European regions. Our estimates suggest that the effect of robots on employment tends to be mostly small and negative during the period 1995–2005 and positive during the period 2005–2015 for the majority of model specifications. Regarding the effects on employment structures, we find some evidence of a mildly polarising effect in the first period, but this finding depends to some extent on the model specifications. In sum, this paper shows that the impact of robots on European labour markets in the last couple of decades has been ambiguous and is not robust. The strength and even the sign of this effect are sensitive to the specifications, as well as to the countries and periods analysed.