TITLE:
The Impact of Industrial Robots on the Skill-Based Wage Gap
AUTHORS:
Yang Han
KEYWORDS:
Industrial Robots, Skill-Based Wage Gap, Labor Productivity, Technology Bias
JOURNAL NAME:
American Journal of Industrial and Business Management,
Vol.12 No.4,
April
20,
2022
ABSTRACT: In recent years, with the disappearance of the demographic dividend of
the aging society and the requirements for high-quality economic development
under the new normal, the application of industrial robots has rapidly advanced
in the Chinese market. As an emerging driving force of technological progress,
artificial intelligence has its own technological bias, but the existing
literature has not paid attention to whether this bias will widen the income
distribution gap of labor with heterogeneous skills. Based on this, this paper
uses the panel data of 30 provinces from 2006 to 2015 to describe the
application level of industrial robots with the import volume of industrial
robots, and establishes a macro proxy indicator of skill-based wage gap
according to the data of different skill industries to test the industrial
robots in the Chinese context, using real effects on skills wage gaps, and conducting an analysis of
geographic heterogeneity. In addition, further investigate the mechanism by
which intelligent equipment exacerbates the skill-based wage gap, and analyze
the possible “substitution effect”, “demand effect” and “asymmetric labor
productivity effect” of the use of industrial robots on the skilled labor
force. The results show that the use of industrial robots has a significant
positive effect on the expansion of the skill-based wage gap. The use of
industrial robots will exacerbate the wage gap between the high-skilled and
low-skilled labor in the market. This effect comes from a combination of three
effects: the “substitution effect”—the use of industrial robots will
change the skill structure of employment, reducing the proportion of
low-skilled workers; the “demand effect”—the use of industrial robots
will change to some extent. The increase in demand for high-skilled labor has no significant impact
on the demand for low-skilled labor.