Time and place: 16.10.19 from 12:15 to 13:45, WiWi2 building, room F4090

Lecturer: Dr. Michael Koch, Assistant Professor, Department of Economics and Business Economics, Aarhus University Denmark

Topic: "Robots and Firms"

The "Diginomics" research group invites to the first Diginomics Brownbag seminar of the winter semester 2019/2020. We are delighted to welcome Dr. Michael Koch, Assistant Professor at Aarhus University in Denmark, as our guest speaker. You will find a short summary of Dr. Koch’s upcoming talk on "Robots and Firms" below:

Abstract. We study the implications of robots 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 the firm level? (3) How does firm heterogeneity in robot adoption affect the industry equilibrium? To address these questions, we look at our data through the lens of recent attempts in the literature to formalize the implications of robot technology. As for the first question, we establish robust evidence that ex-ante larger and more productive firms are more likely to adopt robots, while ex-ante more skill-intensive firms are less likely to do so. As for the second question, we find that robot adoption generates substantial output gains in the vicinity of 20-25% within four years, reduces the labor cost share by 5-7%-points, and leads to net job creation at a rate of 10%. These results are robust to controlling for non-random selection into robot adoption through a difference-in-differences approach combined with a propensity score reweighting estimator. Finally, we reveal substantial job losses in firms that do not adopt robots, and a productivity-enhancing reallocation of labor across firms, away from non-adopters, and toward adopters.