Dataset: Technological Unemployment in Leading Economics Journals

This dataset compiles 133 academic articles from twelve leading economics journals that discuss "technological unemployment." It provides a comprehensive view of how economists have conceptualized the relationship between technological change and employment over time.The articles were collected through a systematic search for the term "technological unemployment" across the full text of influential economics publications, including the "top five" journals (American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies, and Econometrica), five general interest journals (Economic Journal, Review of Economics and Statistics, Annual Review of Economics, Journal of Economic Perspectives, and Journal of Economic Surveys), and two field journals (Labour Economics and Economics of Innovation and New Technology). The collection spans from 1928 to recent publications.

After identifying 153 initial articles, we conducted a manual review to exclude non-substantive pieces, book reviews, and conference programs, resulting in the final corpus of 133 articles. Each article was then hand-coded along multiple dimensions:

Contribution type: Theoretical, Empirical, or Survey/Review

Theoretical possibility: Whether technological unemployment is considered possible in theory

Empirical occurrence: Whether technological unemployment is observed to have occurred in practice

Examples: Specific instances of technologically-induced job loss cited by authors

Temporal dimension: Whether effects are classified as permanent or temporary

Scale dimension: Whether effects are discussed at aggregate, sectoral/occupational, or individual levels

The detailed coding methodology is available in the Appendix of our paper "What is Technological Unemployment?". The dataset facilitates quantitative and qualitative analysis of how this concept has been treated in mainstream economics literature across different historical periods of technological change. More generally, it offers valuable resources for researchers studying the historical evolution of economic thought or patterns in academic concerns.

When using this dataset, please cite: Schneider, B., & Küsters, A. (2025). Dataset: Technological Unemployment in Leading Economics Journals [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15011373.For the complete analysis, refer to our (working) paper: Küsters, A., & Schneider, B. (2025). What is Technological Unemployment?