The RFBerlin Brown Bag Seminar is an informal lunchtime meet up where researchers and students present ongoing work and new ideas in a relaxed, discussion-oriented setting. Rooted in the tradition of bringing one’s own lunch in a paper-brown bag, it offers space for open exchange and constructive feedback.
This week, we welcome Daiji Kawaguchi a Professor at the Graduate School of Public Policy and the Graduate School of Economics at the University of Tokyo. His research lies in labour economics and empirical microeconomics. His recent work examines the effects of automation and AI on employment, skills, and productivity, as well as wage determination, discrimination, and labour market institutions. Daiji Kawaguchi is a Fellow of the RFBerlin Network.
Event Topic:
Factory Automation, Labor Demand, and Market Dynamics
(Tetsuji Okazaki and Xuanli Zhu)
This study examines whether automation reduces employment within adopting establishments or through the reallocation of production and employment across producers. We study the electrification-induced diffusion of powerlooms in Japan’s silk-weaving industry in the early twentieth century, combining factory-level panel data with area-level statistics that also cover small producers. At the factory level, powerloom adoption increased male employment but had no statistically significant effect on female employment. At the market level, however, automation reduced female employment, primarily through a contraction of the small-producer sector. Automation also accelerated the selective disappearance of low-wage factories from the factory records. Wages consequently rose through two distinct channels: a causal increase within adopting factories and a compositional effect generated by the selective disappearance of low-wage factories. These findings show that automation can leave female employment unchanged within adopting establishments while generating substantial losses in female employment through market-level reallocation. Analyses confined to surviving factories may therefore understate market-level employment losses and confound within-factory wage effects with changes in the composition of producers.
Event Details:
Participation in the seminar is limited to RFBerlin members and researchers from affiliated institutions. External researchers who are interested in attending are kindly asked to contact us under [email protected]
