Mirko Draca: The ESRC Future Research Leader grant

Mirko Draca, a CAGE internal associate and an assistant professor in the Economics Department at The University of Warwick, has been awarded a two-year Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Future Research Leader grant. The ESRC Future Research Leaders scheme is intended to enable outstanding early-career social scientists to acquire the skills set to become the future world leaders in their field.

Dr Draca’s research interests focuses on labour economics and applied microeconomics. His research project, ‘The Analysis of Automation by Means of Automation’, uses automated, machine learning classification techniques to analyse historical job description text, and to look at the rise of automation/technology within jobs. The project employs the same statistical techniques that form the basis of technologies such as consumer recommender systems, as used on websites such as Netflix or Amazon, and self-driving vehicles, but puts these techniques to use in addressing social science questions relating to the automation of jobs.