Codes and Data for "Impact of Technological Development on the Employment of Older Adults: Evidence from High-tech Industry Expansion in China"

Technological development and population ageing have been two defining trends in recent decades. However, whether technological advancements reinstate or displace employment opportunities for older workers remains unclear. Using a nationally representative dataset from China and the Bartik instrumental variable approach, we observe that while the overall impact of technological development on employment is estimated to be negative but statistically insignificant, the negative effect intensifies with age and becomes significant beyond the age of approximately 52. We suggest that displacement effects outweigh reinstatement effects, as the negative impact is driven primarily by older adults with lower socioeconomic statuses, who are more vulnerable to job displacement. Furthermore, technological development may exacerbate the income gap between the rich and others among older adults.

We cannot share the CFPS data due to the confidentiality requirements of CFPS. CFPS data is publicly available and easy to request. The CFPS data used in our paper can be requested via https://www.isss.pku.edu.cn/cfps/. To merge the CFPS data with our county-level and city-level variables, the county information of CFPS data is necessary, while it is not included in the public version of CFPS data. Researchers can apply for the restricted data, including the county information and city information, via http://isssappt.pku.edu.cn/index. We share all our codes used in this paper, including data clean code, data merge code, summary statistics code, and empirical regression code together with the Readme file in the replication package to make sure that our results can be replicated.