Robots at Work? Pitfalls of Industry Level Data

Karim Bekhtiar, Benjamin Bittschi and Richard Sellner
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Karim Bekhtiar: Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS), Vienna, Austria

No 30, IHS Working Paper Series from Institute for Advanced Studies

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.

Keywords: Robots; Productivity; Technological Change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 J24 J31 L60 O30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2021-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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https://irihs.ihs.ac.at/id/eprint/5669/ First version, 2021 (application/pdf)

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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