We analyse the effects of exposure to industrial robots on labour market adjustments, exploring longitudinal household data from China. We find that a one standard deviation increase in robot exposure led to a decline in labour force participation (-1%), employment (-7%), and hourly earnings (-8%) of Chinese workers. At the same time, among those who kept working, robot exposure increased the number of hours worked by 8%. These effects were concentrated among the less educated and larger among men, prime-age, and older workers. We also find that more exposed workers increased their participation in technical training and were significantly more likely to retire earlier.
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Giuntella et al. (2024) studied this question.
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