The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, in many respects, caught European governments off guard. Not only was the severity of the disease unclear in the early stages of the crisis, but Europe had also "dodged the bullet" during previous health crises, including the swine flu pandemic

Robotization of production challenges the status‐quo in the economy, some win, while others lose out. Literature has argued that automation causes redistribution, both between capital and labour as within either category. We also know that many economies have chosen to adopt cooperative institutions to negotiate the negative by‐products of such economic changes. What is, however, less clear is how such institutions influence rates of automation themselves. This article contributes to this debate by conducting a panel analysis of sectoral robotization rates and cooperative institutions in 25 OECD countries between 1993 and 2017 using an original institutional indicator. The findings suggest that aside from simply redistributing the costs and benefits of automation throughout the productive sector, cooperative institutions also meaningfully predict higher levels of robot density, showing that more institutionalized economies do not lag behind in terms of automation. What is more, these institutions also seem to co‐determine the rates of robotization occurring during recessions.

We examine economic policy responses to the COVID-19 induced economic collapse in Germany (a coordinated market economy) and the UK (a liberal market economy). The two countries responded to the symmetric economic shock with very similar furlough and business credit schemes to stabilize the demand and supply sides of the economy. However, since these policies fed into very different political-economic structures in both countries, they produced very different results. We attribute this divergence to the effect of “institutional complementarities,” the notion in Varieties of Capitalism that different elements of a system are mutually articulated and, therefore, mutually reinforcing beyond their initial contribution, or vice versa. Our results serve as a cautionary tale to policymakers that introducing policy elements developed in other institutional contexts is complex and challenge us to consider systematically the way in which institutional frameworks actively shape policy outcomes.

AI and other forms of automation are causing a shift into a more capital-intensive form of capitalism. Many scholars have suggested that we can best understand this process as the cost-efficient substitution of labour by capital in routine tasks based on relative factor costs. However, this model, which has cast firms as endlessly chasing the productivity frontier, has not paid sufficient attention to crossnational divergences in technological changes. This paper builds a comparative historical case study tracing the divergent introduction of credit scoring in British and German bank branches to argue that the introduction of credit scoring was a result of a policy-led process in both countries. Increased liberalisation of financial market institutions benefitted the rise of market-led banking which fundamentally changed the business model of banks resulting in a devaluation of the services provided by branch managers. This case suggests we need to think about the role of politics and policy within our, often deterministic, models of labour-saving technological change.