The Effects of Robots on the Workplace

This paper examines the effects of robots across various occupations in US manufacturing plants, extending extant research conducted at the firm and industry levels. We use a difference-in-differences approach matched on industry, commuting zone, and plant size to estimate how employment and skill demand for various occupations change after robot adoption. We find that the introduction of robots is associated with 150 percent increase in the number of job postings and an increase in employment of 15 percent; the increase is larger in production jobs than in support jobs. Comparing effects across plants within adopting firms, we show that the expansion only occurs in the robotic plants, suggesting that prior firm-level studies overlooked the distinction between adopter and (majority) nonadopter plants within firms, underestimating the robotization effect. We find a negligible employment effect at the industry level as the positive effect in adopters is counterbalanced by the lost of workers in nonadopters. The majority of jobs do not change skill composition following the adoption, but the robotized part of the plant requires more design, production, maintenance, repair, and programming skills. We provide credible evidence that the productivity and robot-human complementarity effects dominate any displacement effect and that loss of employment is limited to outcompeted nonadopters.

Recommended citation: Adrianto, Adrianto, Avner Ben-Ner, and Ainhoa Urtasun. "The Effects of Robots on the Workplace." In Academy of Management Proceedings, vol. 2024, no. 1, p. 18345.
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