Does Automation Make the Workplace Safer?
Project: Research
Researcher(s)
Description
Technology has rapidly changed the relationship between labor and capital. This phenomenon triggered lively discussions in the media and tremendous research on how technology would affect the labor market. In this project, we focus on a crucial but largely overlooked question in the machine-vs-labor context: how technology adoption influences workplace safety. Specifically, we examine whether the automation adoption would (i) affect workers’ injury rates and (ii) influence firms’ violation of labor protection laws related to safety-health and wage-hour regulations. Since automation weakens labor’s importance in production, it shifts the bargaining powers away from workers and toward the capital. Hence, automation adoption will inevitably influence how much resources and attention employers would devote to labor protection. We utilize novel and unique data to conduct the first comprehensive firm-level empirical analysis on automation and workplace safety. Using the tax changes that promote capital investment as the identification, we employ difference-in-differences models to draw causal inferences. Our data granularity enables us to study how firm characteristics such as financial constraints, public-listed status, and corporate governance moderate the effect of automation on safety. These analyses are essential but could not be studied in prior research relying on the aggregated data. We also examine the spillover effect, i.e., how one firm’s robot adoption would affect the safety of nonadopting peer firms through local labor markets or product market competitions.Detail(s)
Project number | 9043605 |
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Grant type | GRF |
Status | Active |
Effective start/end date | 1/09/23 → … |