We study the implications of robot adoption at the level of individual firms using a rich panel data-set of Spanish manufacturing firms over a 27-year period (1990-2016). We focus on three central questions: (1) Which firms adopt robots? (2) What are the labor market effects of robot adoption at...

This paper documents a positive relationship between labor-friendly institutions and investment in industrial robots in a sample of advanced economies. Institutions explain a substantial proportion of cross-country variation in automation. The relationship between institutions and robots is...

We investigate the impact of robot adoption on electoral outcomes in 14 Western European countries, between 1993 and 2016. We employ both official election results at the district level and individual-level voting data, combined with party ideology scores from the Manifesto Project. We measure...

Prettner (2019) studies the implications of automation for economic growth and the labor share in a variant of the Solow-Swan model. The aggregate production function allows for two types of capital, traditional and automation capital. Traditional capital and labor are imperfect substitutes...

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, technological change has led to the automation of existing tasks and the creation of new ones, as well as the reallocation of labor across occupations and industries. These processes have been costly to individual workers, but labor demand has...

While economic theory suggests substitutability between labor and capital, little evidence exists regarding the causal effect of labor supply on inventing labor-saving technologies. We analyze the impact of exogenous changes in regional labor supply on automation innovation by exploiting an...

What is the effect of robots and tools on employment and inequality? Using natural language processing and an instrumental variable approach, we discover that robots have led to a sizable decrease in the employment and wages of low-skill workers in operational occupations. However, tools -...

We study the effect of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on employment across US commuting zones over the period 2000-2020. A simple model shows that AI can automate jobs or complement workers, and illustrates how to estimate its effect by exploiting variation in a novel measure of local exposure to...

We investigate the impact of investment in automation-related goods on adopting and non-adopting firms in the Italian economy during 2011-2019. We integrate datasets on trade activities, firms', and workers' characteristics for the population of Italian importing firms and estimate the effects...

We use French data over the 1994-2013 period to study how imports of industrial robots affect firm-level outcomes. Compared to other firms operating in the same 5-digit sector, robot importers are larger, more productive, and employ a higher share of managers and engineers. Over time, robot...