Robots at Work? Pitfalls of Industry Level Data

Bekhtiar, KarimORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6667-1075; Bittschi, BenjaminORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7366-7349 and Sellner, RichardORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7519-184X (February 2021) Robots at Work? Pitfalls of Industry Level Data. IHS Working Paper Series 30, 32 p.

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Abstract

In a seminal paper Graetz and Michaels (2018) find that robots increase labor productivity and TFP, lower output prices and adversely affect the employment share of low-skilled labor. We show that these effects hold only, when comparing hardly-robotizing with highly-robotizing sectors and collapse, when only the latter are analyzed. Controlling for demographic workforce variables reestablishes the productivity effects, but still rejects positive wage effects and skill-biased technological change. Additionally, we find no effects, when the investigation period is extended to the most recent data (2008-2015) and document non-monotonicity in one of the instruments, which calls the respective results into question.

Item Type: IHS Series
Keywords: Robots, Productivity, Technological Change
Classification Codes (e.g. JEL): E24, J24, J31, L60, O30
Research Units: European Governance, Public Finance and Labor Markets
Macroeconomics and Business Cycles
Date Deposited: 19 Feb 2021 09:14
Last Modified: 03 Dec 2024 07:04
URI: https://irihs.ihs.ac.at/id/eprint/5669

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