Robots and risk of COVID-19 workplace contagion: Evidence from Italy

This work investigates the cross-industry relationship between robot adoption and the risk of contracting COVID-19 in the workplace in Italy. Using a novel dataset on the risk of workplace contagion, we show that industries employing more robots tend to exhibit lower risks, thereby providing some empirical support for the widely held, but so far untested, hypothesis that robots can help mitigate the risk of contagion among workers by reducing...