Automation, Performance and International Competition: Firm-level Comparisons of Process Innovation

Lene Kromann () and Anders Sørensen
Additional contact information
Lene Kromann: Department of Economics, Copenhagen Business School, Postal: Department of Economics, Copenhagen Business School, Porcelænshaven 16 A, 1, DK-2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark

No 03-2015, Working Papers from Copenhagen Business School, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper presents new evidence on tradeinduced automation in manufacturing firms using unique data combining a retrospective survey that we have assembled with register data for 2005-2010. In particular, we establish a causal effect where firms that have specialized in product types for which the Chinese exports to the world market has risen sharply invest more in automated capital compared to firms that have specialized in other product types. We also study the relationship between automation and firm performance and find that firms with high increases in scale and scope of automation have faster productivity growth than other firms. Moreover, automation improves the efficiency of all stages of the production process by reducing setup time, run time, and inspection time and increasing uptime and quantity produced per worker. The efficiency improvement varies by type of automation.

Keywords: automation; productivity; production theory; efficiency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D24 L11 L22 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48 pages
Date: 2015-10-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-com, nep-cse, nep-eff, nep-hrm, nep-ino, nep-sbm and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10398/9192 Full text (application/pdf)
Full text not avaiable

Related works:
Journal Article: Automation, performance and international competition: a firm-level comparison of process innovation (2019)
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:hhs:cbsnow:2015_003

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Copenhagen Business School, Department of Economics Copenhagen Business School, Department of Economics, Porcelaenshaven 16 A. 1.floor, DK-2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CBS Library Research Registration Team ().