Robots, jobs and wages
The evidence on what automation does to employment, which is the question every owner is really asking and almost nobody in this industry answers with a citation.
12 works. Metadata and abstracts from OpenAlex, harvested 2026-08-23. We have not summarized, graded or characterized this research ourselves, and the abstracts below are the authors' own.
Robots and Jobs: Evidence from US Labor Markets
We study the effects of industrial robots on US labor markets. We show theoretically that robots may reduce employment and wages and that their local impacts can be estimated using variation in exposure to robots, defined from industry-level advances in robotics and local industry employment. We estimate robust negative effects of robots on employment and wages across commuting zones. We also show that areas most exposed to robots after 1990 do not exhibit any differential trends before then, and robots’ impact is distinct from other capital and technologies. One more robot per thousand workers reduces the employment-to-population ratio by 0.2 percentage points and wages by 0.42%.
The Adjustment of Labor Markets to Robots
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.
Robots and reshoring: Evidence from Mexican labor markets
Industrial robots, employment growth, and labor cost: A simultaneous equation analysis
In recent years, the global rapid expansion of industrial robots has induced ever-increasing concerns for the cause and effect of such growth, particularly with regard to its relationship with labor. This paper analyzes the factors underlying the adoption of industrial robots, employment growth and structure, and labor costs, taking into account the two-way causalities between these variables. For the empirical analysis, we use the three-stage least squares (3SLS) method for the system of simultaneous equations and apply it to the panel data constructed for 42 countries. Explanatory variables for each equation include the dependent variables of other equations and exogenous variables, such as the labor market environment, physical and human capital, and country-specific social environment. The empirical results of the present study indicate that the increase in both unit labor costs and...
Robots, reshoring, and the lot of low-skilled workers
Automation and productivity, a cross-country, cross-industry comparison
We investigate the effects of automation on total factor productivity (TFP). Using industry-level panel data for nine countries, we find that more intensive use of industrial robots has a significantly positive effect on TFP. Specifically, an increase of one standard deviation in the robot intensity is associated with more than 6% higher TFP. Moreover, we find that the robot intensity increases with Chinese import competition and that automation is associated with higher wages and unchanged or higher employment.
Political machinery: did robots swing the 2016 US presidential election?
Technological progress has created prosperity for mankind at large, yet it has always created winners and losers in the labour market. During the days of the British Industrial Revolution a sizeable share of the workforce was left worse off by almost any measure as it lost its jobs to technology. The result was a series of riots against machines. In similar fashion, robots have recently reduced employment and wages in US labour markets. Building on the intuition that voters who have lost out to technology are more likely to opt for radical political change, we examine if robots shaped the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election. Pitching technology against a host of alternative explanations, including offshoring and trade exposure, we document that the support for Donald Trump was significantly higher in local labour markets more exposed to the adoption of robots. A counterfactual...
Explaining the Decline in the US Employment-to-Population Ratio: A Review of the Evidence
This paper first documents trends in employment rates and then reviews what is known about the various factors that have been proposed to explain the decline in the overall employment-to-population ratio between 1999 and 2018. Population aging has had a large effect on the overall employment rate over this period, but within-age-group declines in employment among young- and prime-age adults also have played a central role. Among the factors with effects that we can quantify based on existing evidence, labor demand factors, in particular increased import competition from China and the penetration of robots into the labor market, are the most important drivers of observed within-group declines in employment. Labor supply factors, most notably increased participation in disability insurance programs, have played a less important but not inconsequential role. Increases in the real value of...
Smart Farming Technology Trends: Economic and Environmental Effects, Labor Impact, and Adoption Readiness
Farming faces challenges that increase the adverse effects on farms’ economics, labor, and the environment. Smart farming technologies (SFTs) are expected to assist in reverting this situation. In this work, 1064 SFTs were derived from scientific papers, research projects, and industrial products. They were classified by technology readiness level (TRL), typology, and field operation, and they were assessed for their economic, environmental, and labor impact, as well as their adoption readiness from end-users. It was shown that scientific articles dealt with SFTs of lower TRL than research projects. In scientific articles, researchers investigated mostly recording technologies, while, in research projects, they focused primarily on farm management information systems and robotic/automation systems. Scouting technologies were the main SFT type in scientific papers and research projects...
Individual vulnerability to industrial robot adoption increases support for the radical right
The increasing success of populist and radical-right parties is one of the most remarkable developments in the politics of advanced democracies. We investigate the impact of industrial robot adoption on individual voting behavior in 13 western European countries between 1999 and 2015. We argue for the importance of the distributional consequences triggered by automation, which generates winners and losers also within a given geographic area. Analysis that exploits only cross-regional variation in the incidence of robot adoption might miss important facets of this process. In fact, patterns in individual indicators of economic distress and political dissatisfaction are masked in regional-level analysis, but can be clearly detected by exploiting individual-level variation. We argue that traditional measures of individual exposure to automation based on the current occupation of...
Is automation stealing manufacturing jobs? Evidence from South Africa’s apparel industry
There are growing fears that automation will lead to major job displacement and increasing unemployment, particularly in labour-intensive manufacturing. This is especially worrying for developing countries because of the importance of labour-intensive manufacturing to economic development. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the threat of automation to employment, focusing on the manufacturing sector. It does so by critically reviewing studies that evaluate the current and future impact of automation on employment, as well as using industry-specific evidence from the apparel industry in South Africa. Through our literature review, we find that many studies fail to acknowledge: (1) the full range of factors that determine the net impact of automation on employment and; (2) many country-specific and industry-specific barriers to adopting new automation technologies, particularly in...
Death by Robots? Automation and Working-Age Mortality in the United States
The decline of manufacturing employment is frequently invoked as a key cause of worsening U.S. population health trends, including rising mortality due to "deaths of despair." Increasing automation-the use of industrial robots to perform tasks previously done by human workers-is one structural force driving the decline of manufacturing jobs and wages. In this study, we examine the impact of automation on age- and sex-specific mortality. Using exogenous variation in automation to support causal inference, we find that increases in automation over the period 1993-2007 led to substantive increases in all-cause mortality for both men and women aged 45-54. Disaggregating by cause, we find evidence that automation is associated with increases in drug overdose deaths, suicide, homicide, and cardiovascular mortality, although patterns differ by age and sex. We further examine heterogeneity in...
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