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Research papers on Automation and the labor market

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  1. Automation and New Tasks: How Technology Displaces and Reinstates Labor

    Daron Acemoğlu, Pascual Restrepo · 2019 · The Journal of Economic Perspectives · 2,253 citations

    We present a framework for understanding the effects of automation and other types of technological changes on labor demand, and use it to interpret changes in US employment over the recent past. At the center of our framework is the allocation of tasks to capital and labor—the task content of production. Automation, which enables capital to replace labor in tasks it was previously engaged in, shifts the task content of production against labor because of a displacement effect. As a result, automation always reduces the labor share in value added and may reduce labor demand even as it raises productivity. The effects of automation are counterbalanced by the creation of new tasks in which lab

  2. Skills, Tasks and Technologies: Implications for Employment and Earnings

    Daron Acemoğlu, David Autor · 2010 · National Bureau of Economic Research · 2,198 citations

    A central organizing framework of the voluminous recent literature studying changes in the returns to skills and the evolution of earnings inequality is what we refer to as the canonical model, which elegantly and powerfully operationalizes the supply and demand for skills by assuming two distinct skill groups that perform two different and imperfectly substitutable tasks or produce two imperfectly substitutable goods. Technology is assumed to take a factor-augmenting form, which, by complementing either high or low skill workers, can generate skill biased demand shifts. In this paper, we argue that despite its notable successes, the canonical model is largely silent on a number of central e

  3. The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market*

    David Deming · 2017 · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · 1,626 citations

    Abstract The labor market increasingly rewards social skills. Between 1980 and 2012, jobs requiring high levels of social interaction grew by nearly 12 percentage points as a share of the U.S. labor force. Math-intensive but less social jobs—including many STEM occupations—shrank by 3.3 percentage points over the same period. Employment and wage growth were particularly strong for jobs requiring high levels of both math skill and social skills. To understand these patterns, I develop a model of team production where workers “trade tasks” to exploit their comparative advantage. In the model, social skills reduce coordination costs, allowing workers to specialize and work together more efficie

  4. Robots and Jobs: Evidence from US Labor Markets

    Daron Acemoğlu, Pascual Restrepo · 2017 · National Bureau of Economic Research · 904 citations

    As robots and other computer-assisted technologies take over tasks previously performed by labor, there is increasing concern about the future of jobs and wages. We analyze the effect of the increase in industrial robot usage between 1990 and 2007 on US local labor markets. Using a model in which robots compete against human labor in the production of different tasks, we show that robots may reduce employment and wages, and that the local labor market effects of robots can be estimated by regressing the change in employment and wages on the exposure to robots in each local labor market-defined from the national penetration of robots into each industry and the local distribution of employment

  5. The Risk of Automation for Jobs in OECD Countries

    Melanie Arntz, Terry Gregory, Ulrich Zierahn · 2016 · OECD social employment and migration working papers · 840 citations

    In recent years, there has been a revival of concerns that automation and digitalisation might after all result in a jobless future. The debate has been fuelled by studies for the US and Europe arguing that a substantial share of jobs is at “risk of computerisation”. These studies follow an occupation-based approach proposed by Frey and Osborne (2013), i.e. they assume that whole occupations rather than single job-tasks are automated by technology. As we argue, this might lead to an overestimation of job automatibility, as occupations labelled as high-risk occupations often still contain a substantial share of tasks that are hard to automate. Our paper serves two purposes. Firstly, we estima

  6. Artificial Intelligence, Automation and Work

    Daron Acemoğlu, Pascual Restrepo · 2018 · National Bureau of Economic Research · 670 citations

    We summarize a framework for the study of the implications of automation and AI on the demand for labor, wages, and employment. Our task-based framework emphasizes the displacement effect that automation creates as machines and AI replace labor in tasks that it used to perform. This displacement effect tends to reduce the demand for labor and wages. But it is counteracted by a productivity effect, resulting from the cost savings generated by automation, which increase the demand for labor in non-automated tasks. The productivity effect is complemented by additional capital accumulation and the deepening of automation (improvements of existing machinery), both of which further increase the de

  7. The Adjustment of Labor Markets to Robots

    Wolfgang Dauth, Sebastian Findeisen, Jens Suedekum, et al. · 2021 · Journal of the European Economic Association · 522 citations

    Abstract We use detailed administrative data to study the adjustment of local labor markets to industrial robots in Germany. Robot exposure, as predicted by a shift-share variable, is associated with displacement effects in manufacturing, but those are fully offset by new jobs in services. The incidence mostly falls on young workers just entering the labor force. Automation is related to more stable employment within firms for incumbents, and this is driven by workers taking over new tasks in their original plants. Several measures indicate that those new jobs are of higher quality than the previous ones. Young workers also adapt their educational choices, and substitute away from vocational

  9. Is Automation Labor-Displacing? Productivity Growth, Employment, and the Labor Share

    David Autor, Anna Salomons · 2018 · National Bureau of Economic Research · 406 citations

    Many technological innovations replace workers with machines, but this capital-labor substitution need not reduce aggregate labor demand because it simultaneously induces four countervailing responses: own-industry output effects; cross-industry input-output effects; between-industry shifts; and final demand effects. We quantify these channels using four decades of harmonized cross-country and industry data, where we measure automation as industry-level movements in total factor productivity (TFP) that are common across countries. We find that automation displaces employment and reduces labor's share of value-added in the industries in which it originates (a direct effect). In the case of em

  10. Is Automation Labor Share-Displacing? Productivity Growth, Employment, and the Labor Share

    David Autor, David Autor, Anna Salomons, et al. · 2018 · Brookings Papers on Economic Activity · 365 citations

    Many technological innovations replace workers with machines, but this capital-labor substitution need not reduce aggregate labor demand because it simultaneously induces four countervailing responses: own-industry output effects; cross-industry input-output effects; between-industry shifts; and final demand effects. We quantify these channels using four decades of harmonized cross-country and industry data, where we measure automation as industry-level movements in total factor productivity (TFP) that are common across countries. We find that automation displaces employment and reduces labor's share of value-added in the industries in which it originates (a direct effect). In the case of em

  12. Adjusting to Robots: Worker-Level Evidence

    Wolfgang Dauth, Sebastian Findeisen, Jens Suedekum, et al. · 2018 · 119 citations

    We estimate the effect of industrial robots on employment, wages, and the composition of jobs in German labor markets between 1994 and 2014. We find that the adoption of industrial robots had no effect on total employment in local labor markets specializing in industries with high robot usage. Robot adoption led to job losses in manufacturing that were offset by gains in the business service sector. We analyze the impact on individual workers and find that robot adoption has not increased the risk of displacement for incumbent manufacturing workers. They stay with their original employer, and many workers adjust by switching occupations at their original workplace. The loss of manufacturing

  19. Government Employment and Wages and Labor Market Performance

    Zenon Kontolemis, Dimitri Demekas · 1999 · IMF Working Papers · 2 citations

    Government wage, benefit, and employment decisions are not taken on a profit-maximizing basis and have a substantial impact on aggregate labor market performance and unemployment. In a two-sector labor market model with free mobility of labor, an increase in government wages or benefits reduces private sector employment, and government employment is not an effective counter-cyclical instrument. Empirical tests for Greece confirm that the expansion of the public sector in the 1980s contributed to the deterioration of labor market performance.

  20. Digital skills, gender, employment and wages in the Egyptian labor market

    Mina Sami · 2026 · International Journal of Manpower · 1 citations

    Purpose This study examines the effect of digital skills on wages and employment in Egypt, with particular focus on gender differences. Design/methodology/approach The study uses the 2023 wave of the Egyptian Labor Market Panel Survey (ELMPS). Our empirical methodology uses several econometric techniques, including Mincer equations, quantile regressions, Heckman and Blau et al. (2024) selection models. We also do robustness checks to address endogeneity concerns. Findings This paper has three main

  23. Robots, Employment and Wages: Evidence from Turkish Labor Markets

    Uğur Aytun, Yılmaz Kılıçaslan, Oytun Meçik, et al. · 2026 · World Journal of Applied Economics

    This paper investigates how robotization affects local- and worker-level labor market outcomes in Turkey for 2014-2021. We estimate shift-share specifications, instrumenting Turkish industry-level robot adoption with the same indicator in eight leading European countries, utilising a combined dataset of administrative employer-employee data and industry-level robot stocks. Contrary to evidence from advanced economies, we find positive effects of robot exposure on district-level employment growth, concentrated in manufacturing and driven by the automotive industry. This pattern is consistent with the theoretical insight that the labor market effects of automation depend on an economy's positi

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