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Using the micro-level data on China’s export enterprises from 2005 to 2013, this paper discusses the impact of industrial robots on the quality upgrading of export products from two aspects: the change of enterprises’ costs and the structural effect of labor allocation. We find that there is a U-shaped relationship between the use of industrial robots and export products’ quality upgrading, but the enterprises whose robot applications exceed the U-shaped inflection point only account for 22.68%; in other words, most enterprises have not yet realized export products quality upgrading, and there exists a mismatched effect in the initial development stage. The results of mechanism analysis showed that industrial robots have significant effects on the costs and the structure of labor for export enterprises.
Hong et al. (Tue,) studied this question.