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Journal Article
Workers' Shrinking Share of the Pie
Features: {{p}} Economists have advanced a wide variety of explanations for why workers' share of overall income has been going down
Working Paper
Can Pandemic-Induced Job Uncertainty Stimulate Automation?
The COVID-19 pandemic has raised concerns about the future of work. The pandemic may become recurrent, necessitating repeated adoptions of social distancing measures (voluntary or mandatory), creating substantial uncertainty about worker productivity. But robots are not susceptible to the virus. Thus, pandemic-induced job uncertainty may boost the incentive for automation. However, elevated uncertainty also reduces aggregate demand and reduces the value of new investment in automation. We assess the importance of automation in driving business cycle dynamics following an increase in job ...
Discussion Paper
Automation and the Future of Work
There are numerous reports that highlight potential effects that new technology will have on the U.S. labor market, and many of them are not exactly what you would expect. For example, with the advent of the internet and ubiquity of spreadsheets in the 1980s, analyst employment soared. The new technology unlocked latent demand for more analysis that had been simply too expensive before the new communication and productivity technologies became common. The need for more analysis led to more analysts…even though there were new technologies that made the work more efficient or productive.
Journal Article
The Resurgence of Universal Basic Income
Concerns about the effects of automation have brought an old policy proposal back into the limelight
Speech
Hanging a Question Mark
Fed?s Harker Speaks at Management Science?s 65th Anniversary Conference. Philadelphia Fed President Patrick T. Harker gave remarks focusing on technology, automation, and the importance of human insight at Management Science?s 65th Anniversary Conference in Boston. ?In my experience, you run into trouble when you start thinking your model can do all the work,? he said.
Working Paper
Occupation Mobility, Human Capital and the Aggregate Consequences of Task-Biased Innovations
We construct a dynamic general equilibrium model with occupation mobility, human capital accumulation and endogenous assignment of workers to tasks to quantitatively assess the aggregate impact of automation and other task-biased technological innovations. We extend recent quantitative general equilibrium Roy models to a setting with dynamic occupational choices and human capital accumulation. We provide a set of conditions for the problem of workers to be written in recursive form and provide a sharp characterization for the optimal mobility of individual workers and for the aggregate supply ...
Working Paper
Digital Adoption, Automation, and Labor Markets in Developing and Emerging Economies
We document a strong negative link between self-employment and the rate of digital adoption by firms in developing and emerging economies. No link between digital adoption and the unemployment rate is found, however. To explain this evidence, we build a general equilibrium search-and-matching model with endogenous labor force participation, self-employment, endogenous firm entry, and information-and-communications technology adoption. The main finding is that changes in the cost of technology adoption per se cannot rationalize the evidence. Instead, changes in firms' barriers to entry ...
Working Paper
Adjusting to Robots: Worker-Level Evidence
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 ...
Working Paper
The Future of Labor: Automation and the Labor Share in the Second Machine Age
We study the effect of modern automation on firm-level labor shares using a 2018 survey of 1,618 manufacturing firms in China. We exploit geographic and industry variation built into the design of subsidies for automation paid under a vast government industrialization program, “Made In China 2025,” to construct an instrument for automation investment. We use a canonical CES framework of automation and develop a novel methodology to structurally estimate the elasticity of substitution between labor and automation capital among automating firms, which for our preferred specification is 3.8. ...
Discussion Paper
“Forced Automation” by COVID-19? Early Trends from Current Population Survey Data
This empirical study evaluates whether COVID-19 and the threat of future pandemics has expedited the process of automation in the U.S. The results suggest that the pandemic displaced more workers in automatable occupations, putting them at a greater risk of being permanently automated. The automatable jobs that are more vulnerable to the pandemic include jobs that do not permit remote work, have a high risk of COVID-19 transmission, or are in the most affected sectors. While most of the job losses during the pandemic are expected to be temporary, a replication of the analysis for the Great ...