Sorgner, Alina

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Dr. Sorgner received her doctoral degree in economics from the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Germany. Her research work in the field of digitalization, gender, entrepreneurship, and regional studies was published in peer-reviewed journals and discussed in leading newspapers including Süddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine, and La Nación. She regularly collaborates with international organizations (e.g., Women20 and Think20, the initiative groups within the G20), advises policy makers (e.g. members of the German Bundestag), and gives invited talks on these and related topics.

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Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Labor Market Opportunities for Women in the Digital Age
    (2018) Krieger-Boden, Christiane; Sorgner, Alina
    Digitalization offers a variety of opportunities for female empowerment and for a more equal female participation in labor markets, financial markets, and entrepreneurship. Currently, digitalization seems to favor female labor force, since women face on average lower risk of being replaced by machines, as compared to men. Women’s often superior social skills represent a comparative advantage in the digital age, and this is particularly so when social skills are complemented with higher education and advanced digital literacy. However, the same barriers and deficits that obstruct women’s current advancement in many countries may deprive them from many beneficial opportunities in the digital age, including new entrepreneurial opportunities. Major efforts by policy makers are required to invalidate these barriers. New digital technologies should be used more decisively to achieve the goal of gender equality.
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    Mapping the Future of Occupations: Transformative and Destructive Effects of New Digital Technologies on Jobs
    (2019) Fossen, Frank; Sorgner, Alina
    We investigate the impact of new digital technologies upon occupations. We argue that these impacts may be both destructive and transformative. The destructive effects of digitalization substitute human labor, while transformative effects of digitalization complement it. We distinguish between four broad groups of occupations that differ with regard to the impact of digitalization upon them. “Rising star” occupations are characterized by the low destructive and high transformative effects of digitalization. In contrast, “collapsing” occupations face a high risk of destructive effects. “Human terrain” occupations have low risks of both destructive and transformative digitalization, whereas “machine terrain” occupations are affected by both types. We analyze the differences between these four occupational groups in terms of the capabilities, which can be considered bottlenecks to computerization. The results help to identify which capabilities will be in demand and to what degree workers with different abilities can expect their occupations to be transformed in the digital era.
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    Types of institutions and well-being of self-employed and paid employees in Europe
    (2019) Fritsch, Michael; Sorgner, Alina; Wyrwich, Michael
    This paper analyzes the role of different types of institutions, such as entrepreneurship-facilitating entry conditions, labor market regulations, quality of government, and perception of corruption for individual well-being among self-employed and paid employed individuals. Well-being is operationalized by job and life satisfaction of individuals in 32 European countries measured by data from EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC). We find that institutions never affected both occupational groups in opposite ways. Our findings indicate that labor market institutions do not play an important role for well-being. The results suggest that fostering an entrepreneurial society in Europe is a welfare-enhancing strategy that benefits both, the self-employed and paid employees.
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    Bridging the Gender Digital Gap
    (2019) Mariscal, Judith; Mayne, Gloria; Aneja, Urvashi; Sorgner, Alina
    Despite the headway the world has experienced over the last couple of years in terms of a substantial increase in digital access, there are still significant challenges to overcome in ensuring women are included in the transformation to a digital society, which in turn will enhance productivity and social development. Efforts to increase internet adoption access through broadband plans and legislative reforms have yielded improvements in use and adoption. However, there is still a stark and pervasive gender inequality in terms of access, ownership of digital devices, digital fluency as well as the capacity to make meaningful use of the access to technology. Even though affordability is a key source of exclusion, there are also significant socio-cultural norms that restrict access for women. This paper brings forward the argument that access alone is not enough, women need agency and capacity to leverage access. The authors thus highlight the need to make an assessment of the global gender gap and develop meaningful indicators that contribute to the design and implementation of effective policies that drive adoption. We need effective promotion of women´s digital adoption not only from the government but also from the private sector and civil society in order to lead the digital adoption of best practices for women around the world.
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    Artificial Intelligence and Entrepreneurship
    (2024) Fossen, Frank M.; McLemore, Trevor; Sorgner, Alina
    This survey reviews emerging but fast-growing literature on impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) on entrepreneurship, providing a resource for researchers in entrepreneurship and neighboring disciplines. We begin with a review of definitions of AI and show that ambiguity and broadness of definitions adopted in empirical studies may result in obscured evidence on impacts of AI on en-trepreneurship. Against this background, we present and discuss existing theory and evidence on how AI technologies affect entrepreneurial opportunities and decision-making under uncertainty, the adoption of AI technologies by startups, entry barriers, and the performance of entrepreneurial businesses. We add an original empirical analysis of survey data from the German Socio-economic Panel revealing that entrepreneurs, particularly those with employees, are aware of and use AI technologies significantly more frequently than paid employees. Next, we discuss how AI may affect entrepreneurship indirectly through impacting local and sectoral labor markets. The reviewed evidence suggests that AI technologies that are designed to automate jobs are likely to result in a higher level of necessity entrepreneurship in a region, whereas AI technologies that transform jobs without necessarily displacing human workers increase the level of opportunity entrepreneurship. More generally, AI impacts regional entrepreneurship ecosystems (EE) in multiple ways by altering the importance of existing EE elements and processes, creating new ones, and potentially reducing the role of geography for entrepreneurship. Lastly, we address the question of how regulation of AI may affect the entrepreneurship landscape by focusing on the case of the European Union that has pioneered data protection and AI legislation. We conclude our survey by discussing implications for entrepreneurship research and policy.
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    How Are Patented AI, Software and Robot Technologies Related to Wage Changes in the United States?
    (2022) Fossen, Frank M.; Samaan, Daniel; Sorgner, Alina
    We analyze the relationships of three different types of patented technologies, namely artificial intelligence, software and industrial robots, with individual-level wage changes in the United States from 2011 to 2021. The aim of the study is to investigate if the availability of AI technologies is associated with increases or decreases in individual workers' wages and how this association compares to previous innovations related to software and industrial robots. Our analysis is based on available indicators extracted from the text of patents to measure the exposure of occupations to these three types of technologies. We combine data on individual wages for the United States with the new technology measures and regress individual annual wage changes on these measures controlling for a variety of other factors. Our results indicate that innovations in software and industrial robots are associated with wage decreases, possibly indicating a large displacement effect of these technologies on human labor. On the contrary, for innovations in AI, we find wage increases, which may indicate that productivity effects and effects coming from the creation of new human tasks are larger than displacement effects of AI. AI exposure is associated with positive wage changes in services, whereas exposure to robots is associated with negative wage changes in manufacturing. The relationship of the AI exposure measure with wage increases has become stronger in 2016–2021 in comparison to the 5 years before.