With the continuously growing importance of technological development and automation, it is vital to separate the wheat from the chaff and distinguish the effective automation from the lesser. Previous economic research typically investigates automation on a sector or national level. I instead focus on the micro-level effects of a specific setting by investigating the effects of introducing Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in the financial aid operation in the Swedish municipality Ronneby, initiated in 2019. Using a Synthetic Control Method (SCM) with yearly municipal level data, I find a reduction in Ronneby’s application duration for financial aid. The application duration estimates are noisy but robust, unanimous, and economically significant. I also investigate Ronneby's financial aid effects, finding no significant results. The share of households receiving aid in Ronneby displays an initial increase, followed by an equally sized fall at the end of the observation window. I conjecture that this movement could stem from the digitalized applications and a delay caused by the pandemic.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-479556 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Karlberg Hauge, Vincent |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Nationalekonomiska institutionen |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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