2015 RobotsatWork

(Graetz & Michaels, 2015) ⇒ Georg Graetz, and Guy Michaels. (2015). “Robots at Work.” CEPR Discussion Paper No. DP10477.

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Notes

It offers macroeconomic research
It finds that industrial robots have been a substantial driver of labor productivity and economic growth.
It employs new data from the International Federation of Robotics.
It analyzes the use of industrial robots across 14 industries in 17 countries between 1993 and 2007.
It conclude that the use of robots within manufacturing raised the annual growth of labor productivity and GDP by 0.36 and 0.37 percentage points, respectively, between 1993 and 2007. This represents 10% of total GDP growth in the countries studied and 16% of labor productivity growth over that time period.

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.

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	Author	volume	Date Value	title	type	journal	titleUrl	doi	note	year
2015 RobotsatWork	Georg Graetz Guy Michaels			Robots at Work						2015