Robots at Work

Georg Graetz and Guy Michaels

No 8938, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Despite ubiquitous discussions of robots' potential impact, there is almost no systematic empirical evidence on their economic effects. In this paper we analyze for the first time the economic impact of industrial robots, using new data on a panel of industries in 17 countries from 1993-2007. We find that industrial robots increased both labor productivity and value added. Our panel identification is robust to numerous controls, and we find similar results instrumenting increased robot use with a measure of workers' replaceability by robots, which is based on the tasks prevalent in industries before robots were widely employed. We calculate that the increased use of robots raised countries' average growth rates by about 0.37 percentage points. We also find that robots increased both wages and total factor productivity. While robots had no significant effect on total hours worked, there is some evidence that they reduced the hours of both low-skilled and middle-skilled workers.

Keywords: technological change; productivity; robots (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E23 J23 O30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 55 pages
Date: 2015-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff, nep-hrm, nep-lma and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (163)

Published - published in: Review of Economics and Statistics, 2018, 100 (5), 753–768.

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp8938.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Robots at Work (2018)
Working Paper: Robots at work (2018)
Working Paper: Robots at Work (2015)
Working Paper: Robots at Work (2015)
Working Paper: Robots at work (2015)
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:iza:izadps:dp8938

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().