The effects of automation on workers’ wages

This study examines the impact of automation on workers’ wages across 20 European countries between 2010–2018. Overall, it identifies a net positive effect of robot adoption on average wages at the sectoral level, especially pronounced among routine manual and nonroutine manual occupations. Importantly, these effects differ between countries-  workers in Eastern European countries benefit twice as much from automation as their Western European counterparts. In Western European countries, higher average wages are associated with a decreasing share of routine workers. Results are robust to the exclusion of different capital measures, a battery of fixed effects, a change of instrument and an alternative measure of wages.