Robots at Work
Georg Graetz,Guy Michaels +1 more
TLDR
In this article, the authors analyzed the economic impact of industrial robots and found that industrial robots increased both labor productivity and value added, while reducing the hours of both low-skilled and middle-skilled workers.Abstract:
Despite ubiquitous discussions of robots' potential impact, there is almost no systematic empirical evidence on their economic effects. In this paper we analyze for the first time the economic impact of industrial robots, using new data on a panel of industries in 17 countries from 1993-2007.We find that industrial robots increased both labor productivity and value added. Our panel identification is robust to numerous controls, and we find similar results instrumenting increased robot use with a measure of workers' replaceability by robots, which is based on the tasks prevalent in industries before robots were widely employed. We calculate that the increased use of robots raised countries' average growth rates by about 0.37 percentage points. We also find that robots increased both wages and total factor productivity. While robots had no significant effect on total hours worked, there is some evidence that they reduced the hours of both low-skilled and middle-skilled workers.read more
Citations
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Digital Economy Development, Industrial Structure Upgrading and Green Total Factor Productivity: Empirical Evidence from China’s Cities
TL;DR: Wang et al. as mentioned in this paper used the direction distance function (DDF) and the Global Malmquist-Luenberger (GML) productivity index methods to measure the green total factor productivity (GTFP), while Tobit, quantile regression, impulse response function and intermediary effect models were used to study the relationship among digital economy development, industrial structure upgrading and GTFP.
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How does the use of industrial robots affect the ecological footprint? International evidence
TL;DR: In this article , the authors explored the relationship between industrial robots and ecological footprint based on data of 72 countries from 1993 to 2019 and found that UIR reduces the ecological footprint through time saving effect, green employment effect, and energy upgrading effect.
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Does industrial robot application promote green technology innovation in the manufacturing industry?
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors reveal the mechanism and heterogeneity of the application of industrial robots (IRA) affecting green technology innovation (GTI) in the global manufacturing sector, and valuable policy advices are proposed based on the empirical results.
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Does technological innovation bring destruction or creation to the labor market?
TL;DR: In this article , the authors studied the interaction mechanism between innovation and employment and found that new employment negatively impacts the number of patents, indicating that the substitution effect of employment tends to be greater than the creation effect.
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Biomedical soft robots: current status and perspective
TL;DR: The current status of soft robots in biomedical field, including modeling, controls, actuation, fabrication and application, as well as their limitations and future work is reviewed.
References
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Book
The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
Erik Brynjolfsson,Andrew McAfee +1 more
TL;DR: The Second Machine Age identifies the best strategies for survival and offer a new path to prosperity including revamping education so that it prepares people for the next economy instead of the last one, designing new collaborations that pair brute processing power with human ingenuity, and embracing policies that make sense in a radically transformed landscape.
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Steam as a General Purpose Technology: A Growth Accounting Perspective
TL;DR: The contribution of steam to British economic growth in the nineteenth century is estimated using growth accounting methods similar to those recently employed to examine the role of ICT as mentioned in this paper, showing that steam contributed little to growth before 1830 and had its peak impact about a hundred years after Watt's famous invention.
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The Global Decline of the Labor Share
TL;DR: This paper showed that the decrease in the relative price of investment goods, often attributed to advances in information technology and the computer age, induced firms to shift away from labor and toward capital.
Journal ArticleDOI
When Does Labor Scarcity Encourage Innovation
TL;DR: In this article, the conditions under which the scarcity of a factor (in particular, labor) encourages technological progress and technology adoption were studied and the main result was that labor scarcity will encourage technological advances if technology is strongly labor saving.
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The Skill Complementarity of Broadband Internet
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore several possible explanations for the skill bias of broadband adoption and find evidence that broadband internet complements skilled workers in executing non-routine abstract tasks, and substitutes for unskilled workers in performing routine tasks.