2. Contributions of the paper
Can the decrease in prices of ICT account for the decline in the labour share? 50%
Can the decrease in prices of ICT account for the increase in the share of non-routine labour and the decrease in routine labour? Yes

3. Decline of the labour share
Magnitude of the decline in the labour share?
Self employment share used to be imputed so generate a spurious decline (Elsby et al (2013))
Revision of national income and product accounts regarding tables capitalizing Intellectual Property Products (IPP) (Koh et al (2015))
Digitalisation and GDP

4. Decline of the labour share
Considering the proper data is important in order to pick up not only the magnitude but the timing of the decline in the labour share appears to accelerate late 80’s until nowadays

5. Capital labour substitutability
Implausible to explain in an homogeneous capital and labour framework:
Capital deepening can not make it
Capital ratio should have gone up for the whole period
LS declines if productivity grows more than wages, but with more capital both productivity and wages per hour should go up

6. Heterogeneity in labour and capital
Krussell et al (2000) played with different substitutability of capital equipment and skilled and unskilled labour:
This was built to explain distribution issues. Not much in terms of labour share
However, in this setting, an exogenous increase in high skilled labour also produces a reduction in labour share through the complementarity of this type of work with capital
Problems of timing

7. Heterogeneity in labour and capital
In the current paper: routine and non-routine labour and ICT
It is difficult to think on an additional exogenous decrease in routine work so everything comes through capital substitutability
Timing of ICT share increase is equally bad for the starting point of LS decline. Additionally difficulties also in the period after the 00’s.

8. Other potential stories
The model is able to explain one half of the decline of labour share
Some regressions at the industry level pose some doubts on the importance of this mechanism (Elsby et al (2013))
In the previous data it appears that most of the action comes from the lower part of the distribution.
Might offshoring of labour intense inputs be the exogenous shock to routine labour once automation strength declines:
The importance of offshoring is confirmed with industry data regressions (Elsby et al (2013))
Given that some countries are reverting the offshoring process we might have a nice experiment for the near future.

9. Distribution issues
The hypothesis that the decrease in prices of ICT has produced an increase in non-routine occupations while a reduction of routine occupations is well accepted
Autor et al (2013) generate a model to explain relative wages at different parts of the distribution
Interesting evidence at the international level that those countries were deroutinization is more advanced are those with higher ICT deepening (de la Rica and Cortazar (2015))

10. Measurement of routine and non-routine
Measuring routine and non-routine labour is not easy
The paper uses an aggregate group of occupations (“management, professionals and services” as non routine for example)
Most of the literature uses 4 digit occupations
However, what we really want is a measure of jobs susceptible to computerisation Frey and Osborne (2013) it is not exactly routine/non- routine

11. Measurement of routine and non-routine
Even with this finer classification it is not clear that “all” the work done by a worker in a certain occupation might be replaced by a machine. Probably we should go to occupation/task mappings (OECD (2015)) leading to very different magnitudes and distributional implications