Whether robots have a positive or negative impact on job quality and wages depends on the dominant innovation regime in an industry. In an innovation regime with a high cumulativeness of knowledge, i.e. if accumulation of (tacit) knowledge from experience (embodied by workers) is important for...

Under a ‘high cumulativeness’ innovation regime, robot adoption results in better job quality as workers have some negotiation power. The opposite holds for robot adoption in low-cumulativeness regimes. In the latter, robot adoption leads to more dead-end ‘Taylorist’ jobs. Our results...