The Impact of Job Exposure to Artificial Intelligence on the Korean Labor Market in 2020
By Yeseul Lee & Hyeonjun Hwang
This study examines the impact of artificial intelligence exposure on wage and employment outcomes in the Korean labor market in 2020. We propose the Artificial Intelligence Exposure Score (AIES) by integrating 27,921 Korean AI patents from 2011 and 2020 with O*NET task descriptions through Sentence-BERT natural language processing techniques. This approach creates occupation-level exposure measures that reflect Korea-specific innovation patterns. Using data from the Korean Labor and Income Panel Study (KLIPS), we estimate log-linear regression models to analyze wage and employment effects at individual and occupation-region levels. Empirical findings reveal that AI exposure is positively associated with both wages and employment in the Korean labor market. A 1% increase in AIES is associated with a 1.834% increase in monthly wages and a 5.809% increase in employment levels. The wage effects are stronger for male workers, middle-aged workers, and those with higher educational attainment. These findings suggest that AI technologies in Korea have been associated with job creation rather than job displacement during 20112020, supporting the task reinstatement framework where new technologies create complementary tasks for human workers.
Source SSRN
