Robots at Work? Pitfalls of Industry Level Data

Karim Bekhtiar, Benjamin Bittschi and Richard Sellner

No 58, EconPol Working Paper from ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich

Abstract: In a seminal paper Graetz and Michaels (2018) find that robots increase labor productivity and TFP, lower output prices and adversely aect 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.

Date: 2021
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Robots at work? Pitfalls of industry‐level data (2024)
Working Paper: Robots at Work? Pitfalls of Industry Level Data (2021)
Working Paper: Robots at Work?. Pitfalls of Industry Level Data (2021)
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