EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Competing with Robots: Firm-Level Evidence from France

Daron Acemoglu, Claire Lelarge and Pascual Restrepo

No dp-335, Boston University - Department of Economics - The Institute for Economic Development Working Papers Series from Boston University - Department of Economics

Abstract: Using several sources, we construct a data set of robot purchases by French manufacturing firms and study the firm-level implications of robot adoption. Out of 55,390 firms in our sample, 598 have adopted robots between 2010 and 2015, but these firms account for 20% of manufacturing employment and value added. Consistent with theory, robot adopters experience significant declines in labor share and the share of production workers in employment, and increases in value added and productivity. They expand their overall employment as well. However, this expansion comes at the expense of their competitors (as automation reduces their relative costs). We show that the overall impact of robot adoption on industry employment is negative. We further document that the impact of robots on overall labor share is greater than their firm-level effects because robot adopters are larger and grow faster than their competitors.

Keywords: automation; competition; labor share; manufacturing; productivity; reallocation; robots; tasks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J23 J24 L11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2020-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-tid
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (176)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bu.edu/econ/files/2020/01/competing_with_robots_nber.pdf
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden (http://www.bu.edu/econ/files/2020/01/competing_with_robots_nber.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.bu.edu/econ/files/2020/01/competing_with_robots_nber.pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Competing with Robots: Firm-Level Evidence from France (2020) Downloads
Working Paper: Competing with Robots: Firm-Level Evidence from France (2020) Downloads
Working Paper: Competing with Robots: Firm-Level Evidence from France (2020)
Working Paper: Competing with Robots: Firm-Level Evidence from France (2020) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bos:iedwpr:dp-335

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Boston University - Department of Economics - The Institute for Economic Development Working Papers Series from Boston University - Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Program Coordinator (iedcoord@bu.edu).

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:bos:iedwpr:dp-335