The Long-Term Effects of Automation on the Labor Market

Automation and digitalization have transformed how firms produce and organize work. Some workers have benefited, others have not; outcomes depend on the tasks they perform. Yet structural changes such as automation may not only affect the labor market today but can also have long-term consequences for social mobility across generations.

This project aims to examine how automation affects the Swedish labor market, with a particular focus on how different groups of workers are influenced. We study how parents’ exposure to automation in the 1990s is related to their children’s occupational outcomes in the 2010s.

The project combines data on occupational exposure to new technologies with industry-level information on robot use in Sweden. To isolate the effect of technology from other factors, we exploit variation in robot adoption across industries and over time.