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Title: Robotization and Unbalanced Changes in High-Skill Employment

Citation Type: Working Paper

Publication Year: 2023

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Abstract: This paper fills a gap in the literature by presenting new evidence of the negative impact of robotization on the change in high-skill employment in US labor markets between 2000 and 2014. I find that the adoption of one robot per thousand workers reduced the change in the high-skill employment-to-population ratio by 0.18 to 0.24 percentage points, which implies that each robot prevented the creation of 4 high-skill jobs. Though these findings are surprising with regard to the literature, which globally argues that technological change favors high-skill employment, they give new support to a range of theoretical studies. I show that these results can be explained by a model of tasks commonly used in the literature. In such models robotization generates reallocations of tasks between low-skill and high-skill workers, which can negatively impact the employment of high-skill workers. I calibrate the model and find that robotization reduced the magnitude of the effects that increase high-skill employment by almost half during this period.

Url: https://www.tepp-repec.eu/RePEc/files/teppwp/tepp-wp-23-03-lp.pdf

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Authors: Parmentier, Lucas

Series Title: TEPP Working Paper

Publication Number: 2023-03

Institution: TEPP

Pages: 1-48

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Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure

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