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.
Highlights
Rapid improvements in robot capabilities have fuelled concerns about the implications of robot adoption for jobs
We study the relation between industrial robots and occupational shifts by task content
Using a panel of 19 industries in 37 high-income and Emerging Market and Transition Economies (EMTEs) from 2005-2015, we find that increased use of robots is associated with positive changes in the employment share of non-routine analytic jobs and negative changes in the share of routine manual jobs
Summary
Rapid improvements in robot capabilities have fuelled concerns about the implications of robot adoption for jobs. The main contribution of this paper is to empirically study the impact of industrial robots on the occupational structure of the workforce across industries in a set of high-income as well as Emerging Market and Transition Economies (EMTEs). The database on occupational employment from Reijnders and de Vries (2018) allows us to examine the share of employment in occupations with a high content of routine tasks – i.e. tasks that can be performed by following a well-defined set of procedures. We follow Graetz and Michaels (2018) in constructing measures of robot adoption by countryindustry pairs and relate these to changes in occupational employment shares. Our main finding is that country-industry pairs that saw a more rapid increase in robot adoption experienced larger reductions in the employment share of routine manual jobs
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