The Rise of Robots and the Fall of Routine Jobs

Gaaitzen de Vries, Elisabetta Gentile (), Sébastien Miroudot and Konstantin Wacker
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Elisabetta Gentile: Asian Development Bank

No 619, ADB Economics Working Paper Series from Asian Development Bank

Abstract: This paper examines the impact of industrial robots on jobs. We combine data on robot adoption and occupations by industry in 37 economies for the period 2005–2015. We exploit differences across industries in technical feasibility—defined as the industry’s share of tasks replaceable by robots—to identify the impact of robot usage on employment. The data allow us to differentiate effects by the routine intensity of employment. We find that a rise in robot adoption relates significantly to a fall in the employment share of routine manual task-intensive jobs. This relation is observed in high-income economies, but not in emerging market and transition economies.

Keywords: employment; occupations; robots; tasks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E23 J23 O30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2021-08-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-mac and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Journal Article: The rise of robots and the fall of routine jobs (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ris:adbewp:0619

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