Technological Unemployment Revisited: Automation in a Search and Matching Framework

Will low-skilled workers be replaced by automation? To answer this question, we set up a search and matching model that features two skill types of workers and includes automation capital as an additional production factor. Automation capital is a perfect substitute for low-skilled workers and an imperfect substitute for high-skilled workers. Using this type of model, we show that the accumulation of automation capital decreases the labor market tightness in the low-skilled labor market and increases the labor market tightness in the high-skilled labor market. This leads to a rising unemployment rate and falling wages of low-skilled workers and a falling unemployment rate and rising wages of high-skilled workers. In a cali- bration to German data, we show that one additional industrial robot causes a loss of 1.66 low-skilled manufacturing jobs, whereas the additional robot creates 3.42 high-skilled manufacturing jobs. Thus, overall employment even rises with automation.