(The) end of job polarization? information technology, industrial robot, and employment in US manufacturing

Abstract

As robots and automation are expected to replace jobs, there have been growing interest in robots in IS and economics. We find empirical evidence that industrial robots have expanded the set of tasks performed by IT and machines in line with recent expectation and modeling approaches. Using industry-level robot capital data from 2004 to 2016, we show that industrial robots substitute for the non-routine manual task in manufacturing. Additionally, robots are not associated with the routine manual task unlike the extant skill-biased technological change (SBTC) where IT substitutes for the routine tasks. We adopt the robot capital of European countries as an instrumental variable. Our study contributes to broadening the scope of the SBTC literature and understanding the advanced information technology such as robotics.