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This study explores how technology adoption affects labor. I investigate the effect of restaurants' adoption of self-service kiosks on labor outcomes, using survey data from Korea. I find that businesses’ adoption of self-service kiosks had little impact on their number of full-time or part-time workers. However, restaurants with a self-service kiosk decreased both the wages of their part-time workers and the number of unpaid family members they employed. The results are driven by franchise restaurants. Independently owned restaurants that adopted kiosks increased the wages of their full-time workers. These findings provide support for the efficiency wage theory as well as the skill-biased technological change theory. The results suggest that when businesses adopt new technologies, these technologies do not replace unskilled labor, but rather raise the relative wages of skilled workers.
Chungeun Yoon (2023) studied this question.