The Adjustment of Labor Markets to Robots

By W. Dauth, S. Findeisen, Jens Suedekum, Nicole Woessner. Journal of the European Economic Association, 2021

421 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use detailed administrative data to study the adjustment of local labor markets to industrial robots in Germany. Robot exposure, as predicted by a shift-share variable, is associated with displacement effects in manufacturing, but those are fully offset by new jobs in services. The incidence mostly falls on young workers just entering the labor force. Automation is related to more stable employment within firms for incumbents, and this is driven by workers taking over new tasks in their original plants. Several measures indicate that those new jobs are of higher quality than the previous ones. Young workers also adapt their educational choices, and substitute away from vocational training towards colleges and universities. Finally, industrial robots have benefited workers in occupations with complementary tasks, such as managers or technical scientists.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Health Professions

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/69723d3c958402328cdd2421b5820a2484cf1b52

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Citations in the corpus

The rise of robots and the fall of routine jobs (2020, methodology): “We view this analysis as a complementary approach to the within-country comparisons in Acemoglu and Restrepo (2020) , Dauth et al. (2019) , and Faber (2018) .”
New Frontiers: The Origins and Content of New Work, 1940–2018 (2022, background): “On industrial robotics, see Graetz and Michaels (2018), Chiacchio et al. (2018), Humlum (2019), Acemoglu et al. (2020b); Acemoglu and Restrepo (2020), De Vries et al. (2020), Bonfiglioli et al. (2020), Faber (2020), and Dauth et al. (2021).”
Place-Based Policies and Spatial Disparities across European Cities (2020, positive): “This shift was caused by a mixture of increased globalisation (like the “China shock,” as in Autor, Dorn, and Hanson 2013; Dauth and Südekum 2016) and technological change and increased automation (Acemoglu and Restrepo 2019; Dauth et al. 2019).”
The Elusive Explanation for the Declining Labor Share (2021, background): “Using these German data, Dauth et al. (2021) nd no adverse e¤ect of robot exposure on total local employment, but localities with more exposure have seen relatively slower growth in manufacturing jobs and relatively faster growth of service-sector jobs.”