Abstract

The recent advance of robotics and automation, artificial intelligence in particular, has sparked heated discussion widely across academia, policy arena, practitioners, and the general public. Against this backdrop, we outline a research project on industrial robots in Germany using a newly (to-be) collected plant-level data. The project broadly consists of three interconnected research questions: A) What are the correlates and determinants of the robot use at the plant level? B) What is the impact of robot use on plant-level productivity? C) What are the labor market consequences of robot adoption?   The literature has investigated all three questions predominantly using the industry-level IFR data, so our results, once obtained, would be among the first papers using microeconomic data to shed light on the rise of robots.