Working Paper
Robots at Work? Pitfalls of Industry Level Data
Karim Bekhtiar, Benjamin Bittschi, Richard Sellner
ifo Institute, Munich, 2021
EconPol Working Paper 58
ifo Institute, Munich, 2021
EconPol Working Paper 58
![](https://www.ifo.de/DocImg/EconPol_Working_Paper_58_Robots_at_work.jpg?c=1689236926)
In a seminal paper Graetz and Michaels (2018) find that robots increase labor productivity and TFP, lower output prices and adversely aect the employment share of low-skilled labor. We show that these effects hold only, when comparing hardly-robotizing with highly-robotizing sectors and collapse, when only the latter are analyzed. Controlling for demographic workforce variables reestablishes the productivity effects, but still rejects positive wage effects and skill-biased technological change. Additionally, we find no effects, when the investigation period is extended to the most recent data (2008-2015) and document non-monotonicity in one of the instruments, which calls the respective results into question.