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Journal article

Robots at work


We analyze for the first time the economic contributions of modern industrial robots, which are flexible, versatile, and autonomous machines. We use novel panel data on robot adoption within industries in seventeen countries from 1993 to 2007 and new instrumental variables that rely on robots' comparative advantage in specific tasks. Our findings suggest that increased robot use contributed approximately 0.36 percentage points to annual labor productivity growth, while at the same time raising total factor productivity and lowering output prices. Our estimates also suggest that robots did not si


Georg Graetz and Guy Michaels

1 December 2018


Review of Economics and Statistics 100(5) , pp.753-768, 2018


DOI: 10.1162/rest_a_00754

https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/rest_a_00754

This Journal article is published under the centre's Labour markets programme.

This publication comes under the following theme: Labour market inequality