What workers and robots do: An activity-based analysis of the impact of robotization on changes in local employment

Abstract

This work investigates the impact that changes in the local exposure to robots had on changes in Italian employment over the period 2011–2018. It contributes to the debate by providing novel and granular evidence on the impact of robot adoption on new activity-based groups of occupations and by focusing on the overlap between the functional similarities of robot applications and occupations. This framework, consistently centered on workers’ and robots’ activities, reveals highly heterogeneous effects of robotization, ranging from positive to negative across different groups of occupations, thereby supporting a nuanced and granular reading of this debated phenomenon. In particular, the local share of robot operators increases where the increase in robot adoption is larger, while the local share of workers using intensively their torso decreases.