Sick of Robots—Heterogeneous Effects of Industrial Robots on Sickness Absence

Abstract

This paper studies how the introduction of industrial robots affects sickness absence among workers in the manufacturing sector in Norway. We use data on the imports of industrial robots at the firm level, combined with employee-firm linked register data, to investigate the impact of robotization on the duration of sick leave (SL). We find that robotization leads to a statistically significant increase in SL duration of approximately 1.7 days. Workers in blue-collar occupations are especially negatively affected, and among this group those with routine tasks experience even higher levels of SL following robotization, with an average increase of around 5 days. We conduct additional analyses looking at different categories of diagnoses across various occupation groups and find heterogeneous effects. Our results suggest that for blue-collar and routine workers robotization leads to increased musculoskeletal SL, while we only observe an increase in injuries for STEM workers, with maintenance engineers especially negatively affected. Our findings suggest several mechanisms that differ by type of occupation, ranging from musculoskeletal diagnoses caused by repetitive strain to an increase in injuries resulting from working directly with the newly installed industrial robots.