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Minimum Wages and Rise of the Robots -- by Erik Brynjolfsson, J. Frank Li, Javier Miranda, Robert Seamans, Andrew J. Wang
A new academic paper by economists including Erik Brynjolfsson examines the relationship between minimum wage policy and firms' adoption of automation technologies. Using state-level robot exposure data and plant-level industrial robot import data linked to U.S. Census microdata from 1992–2021, the study finds that a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage raises robot adoption in manufacturing by roughly 8 percent relative to the mean. The research uses state border discontinuities as a natural