Search Results
Working Paper
Workplace Automation and Corporate Liquidity Policy
Using an occupational probability of computerization, we measure a firm’s ability to replace labor with automated capital. Our evidence suggests that the potential to automate a workforce enhances operating flexibility, allowing firms to hold less precautionary cash. To provide evidence for this mechanism, we exploit the 2011–2012 Thailand hard drive crisis as an exogenous shock to the cost of automation. In addition, the negative relation between prospective automation and cash holdings is greater for firms with a lower expected cost of worker displacement and greater ...
Discussion Paper
Women Have Been Hit Hard by the Loss of Routine Jobs, Too
Technological change and globalization have caused a massive transformation in the U.S. economy. While creating new opportunities for many workers, these forces have eliminated millions of good-paying jobs, particularly routine jobs in the manufacturing sector. Indeed, a great deal of attention has focused on the consequences of the loss of blue-collar production jobs for prime‑age men. What is often overlooked, however, is that women have also been hit hard by the loss of routine jobs, particularly administrative support jobs—a type of routine work that has historically been largely ...
Working Paper
Reshoring, Automation, and Labor Markets Under Trade Uncertainty
We study the implications of trade uncertainty for reshoring, automation, and U.S. labor markets. Rising trade uncertainty creates incentive for firms to reduce exposures to foreign suppliers by moving production and distribution processes to domestic producers. However, we argue that reshoring does not necessarily bring jobs back to the home country or boost domestic wages, especially when firms have access to labor-substituting technologies such as automation. Automation improves labor productivity and facilitates reshoring, but it can also displace jobs. Furthermore, automation poses a ...
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 ...
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
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. ...
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 ...
Does Worker Scarcity Spur Investment, Automation and Productivity? Evidence from Earnings Calls
An analysis suggests labor issues like higher wages and hiring difficulties have prompted some firms to invest in automation, leading to productivity growth.
Working Paper
The Covid-19 Pandemic Spurred Growth in Automation: What Does this Mean for Minority Workers?
The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated trends in automation as many employers seek to save on labor costs amid widespread illness, increased worker leverage, and market pressures to onshore supply chains. While existing research has explored how automation may displace non-specialized jobs, there is typically less attention paid to how this displacement may interact with preexisting structural issues around racial inequality. This analysis updates that of a 2021 Brookings paper by the authors, finding that Black and Hispanic workers continue to be overrepresented in the 30 occupations with the ...
Working Paper
Automation, Market Concentration, and the Labor Share
Since the early 2000s, a rising share of production has been concentrated in a small number of superstar firms. We argue that the rise of automation technologies and the cross-sectional variation of robot use rates have contributed to the increases in industrial concentration. Motivated by empirical evidence, we build a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms, endogenous automation decisions, and variable markups. Firms choose between two types of technologies, one uses workers only and the other uses both workers and robots subject to an idiosyncratic fixed cost of robot ...