Wolfgang Dauth, Sebastian Findeisen, Jens Südekum, Nicole Woessner
The robots are coming. According to a widely cited study, about 47% of total US employment is susceptible to computerized automation (Frey and Rahbari 2016, Frey and Osborne 2017). A heated discussion, stimulated by the current wave of automation, concerns the future of work and society. Recent empirical studies highlight ways that the rising importance of robots in industrial production have transformed the labour market and the economy at large. Following seminal work by Graetz and Michaels (2018), a growing literature has exploited industry-level data from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) to study the consequences of robotisation for local labour markets (Acemoglu and Restrepo 2020), individual workers (Dauth et al. 2020), and occupational structure (de Vries et al. 2020).