Robots,Tasks And Employment Polarization Effect

The report of the 20 th Party Congress states that "Chinese-style modernization is the modernization of common prosperity for all people.Common prosperity is the essential requirement of socialism with Chinese characteristics and is a long-term historical process." In the new stage of China’s high-quality development,how to make better use of new technologies while promoting high-quality employment and increasing the proportion of labor income in national income is a key initiative to promote common prosperity.Industrial robots can effectively improve the production efficiency of enterprises,reduce their operating costs and production risks,and are regarded as the "crown jewel of manufacturing industry",whose R&D,manufacturing and application are important symbols of a country’s technological innovation and high-end manufacturing level.As robots become more and more popular in China,the impact of robots on employment and income has become more and more serious,which has aggravated people’s concern about unemployment and widening income gap.Based on the technological characteristics of robots and their heterogeneous impact on employment,this thesis objectively assesses the impact of robot applications on the employment structure of China’s labor force both theoretically and empirically,and identifies for the first time the employment polarization effect of robots in China at the firm level,and further examines the underlying mechanisms and impact channels at the micro-individual and macro-city levels.At the theoretical level,a simple "robot-task" model is developed to illustrate the deeper logic of robots’ influence on employment structure.On the one hand,robots have a good complementary effect with non-conventional production tasks,which promotes the employment growth of non-conventional tasks;on the other hand,with the application of robots,the frontier of technological possibilities gradually expands,and conventional task-oriented labor is gradually replaced by robots,which eventually leads to employment polarization effects.Moreover,the more companies rely on the use of robots in the product production process,the more obvious the employment polarization effect becomes.Based on theoretical analysis,this thesis examines the impact of robot adoption on the employment structure in China using Chinese industrial enterprise survey data and customs trade data from 2000 to 2013.It is found that robots do lead to the phenomenon of employment polarization,with firms having significantly higher non-conventional task labor employment than conventional task labor employment after the adoption of robots.In terms of the impact mechanism,this thesis first confirms the substitution effect of robots on conventional task labor at the individual level using CFPS microdata from 2010 to 2014,and the test finds that robots will directly crowd out workers engaged in conventional tasks,leading to their risk of unemployment.Second,using panel data for 283 cities from the China Urban Statistics Yearbook,this thesis examines the finding of a boosting effect of urban robot use on employment in productive services as a way to characterize the effect of non-conventional task job creation.Further evidence verifies that robots embody more job task-bias attributes(RBTC)than skill-bias attributes(SBTC),and this thesis makes further extensions and advancements to the application of RBTC theory from the perspective of employment polarization.In addition,the results of the heterogeneity analysis indicate that the employment polarization effect of robots is more significant in non-state enterprises,export trade enterprises,and larger enterprises.The findings of this thesis hold after a series of robustness tests including the use of instrumental variables to account for endogeneity,the replacement of the core explanatory variables,the deletion of the sample,the inclusion of "region × time" fixed effects,and the exclusion of possible exogenous policy shocks.The use of robots has significantly affected the structure of employment,leading to the phenomenon of employment polarization.This implies that robot adoption triggers a reshuffling and reorganization of job tasks,requiring more high-and low-skilled labor to be matched with robots to create complementary effects.This thesis deepens the understanding of how robots affect the structure of employment and provides an important reference for high-quality employment policies in the digital economy.The findings of this thesis can provide a basis for constructing differentiated and targeted high-quality employment policies,and provide useful governance references for relevant government administrations.