Bloomberg News online:
How low can you go? Economists game out U.S. unemployment bounds
15 August 2017
Grandma got replaced by a robot
Old, lower-skilled manufacturing employees lose jobs to robots amid minimum wage increases, new research from the University of California at Irvine’s David Neumark and London School of Economics’ Grace Lordan shows. It’s a well-told story that sudden wage hikes spur job loss, and the innovation here is that the authors dig into just where those cuts happen. A $1 increase in the minimum wage decreases the share of low-skilled automate-able jobs by 0.43 percentage point, the authors find, but in manufacturing that jumps to 0.99 percentage point, and the share of older workers declines most sharply (women and black workers also post big drops).
Related publications
People Versus Machines: The Impact of Minimum Wages on Automatable Jobs
Published August 2017
Available on the NBER website