Marketing

Labour economics

Early adopter

Microeconomics

Chromatography

Competitor analysis

Wage

Economics

Computer science

Business

Wage share

Efficiency wage

Value (mathematics)

Demographic economics

Productivity

Industrial organization

Chemistry

Sample (material)

Economic growth

Machine learning

Production (economics)

We study the firm-level implications of robot adoption in France. Of 55,390 firms in our sample, 598 adopted robots between 2010 and 2015, but these firms accounted for 20 percent of manufacturing employment. Adopters experienced significant declines in labor shares, the share of production workers in employment, and increases in value added and productivity. They expand their overall employment as well. However, this expansion comes at the expense of competitors, leading to an overall negative association between adoption and employment. Robot adoption has a large impact on the labor share because adopters are larger and grow faster than their competitors.

Competing with Robots: Firm-Level Evidence from France