As robots and other computer-assisted technologies take over tasks previously performed
by labor, there is increasing concern about the future of jobs and wages. We analyze the
effect of the increase in industrial robot usage between 1990 and 2007 on US local labor
markets. Using a model in which robots compete against human labor in the production of
different tasks, we show that robots may reduce employment and wages, and that the local
labor market effects of robots can be estimated by regressing the change in employment
and wages on the exposure to robots in each local labor market—defined from the national
penetration of robots into each industry and the local distribution of employment across
industries. Using this approach, we estimate large and robust negative effects of robots
on employment and wages across commuting zones. We bolster this evidence by showing
that the commuting zones most exposed to robots in the post-1990 era do not exhibit any
differential trends before 1990. The impact of robots is distinct from the impact of imports
from China and Mexico, the decline of routine jobs, offshoring, other types of IT capital, and
the total capital stock (in fact, exposure to robots is only weakly correlated with these other
variables). According to our estimates, one more robot per thousand workers reduces the
employment to population ratio by about 0.18-0.34 percentage points and wages by 0.25-0.5
percent.