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VOXEU: Automation and jobs: When technology boosts employment
12 September 2019
Of course, the elasticity of the response to automation is an empirical question. Recent studies indeed find evidence of positive employment responses in some industries with new information technologies, automation, and robotics. For example, Gaggl and Wright (2014), Mann and Puttmann (2017), and Bessen and Righi (2019) find that information technology appears to increase employment in many industries but decrease it in others. Koch et al. (2019) find that firms adopting robots increase employment, whereas Graetz and Michaels (2018) and Dauth et al. (2017) find no effect on employment. Acemoglu and Restrepo (2017), in contrast, find a negative effect.