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The Century Foundation: How Robots Are Beginning to Affect Workers and Their Wages
17 October 2019
Another widely cited study - by Georg Graetz at Uppsala University and Guy Michaels of the London School of Economics - also uses the IFR data but a different methodology, and shows that industrial robots increase productivity and wages, but reduce the number of jobs available to low-skilled workers. Specifically, the measure of industrial robot usage employed by Graetz and Michaels indicates that, for the overall economy, one more robot per thousand workers reduces the aggregate employment-to-population ratio by about 0.20 percentage points, which is equivalent to one new robot lowering employment by approximately 3.3 workers. With respect to wages, one more robot per thousand workers reduces wages by 0.37 percent.