{"title":"Air pollution and firms' robot adoption: Evidence from China","authors":"Yuwei Tang , Yanlin Sun , Zhenyu He","doi":"10.1016/j.econmod.2024.106957","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Studies exploring the determinants of robot adoption are scarce, and majority of the literature attributes robot adoption to economic and social factors related to labor costs, neglecting the impact of air pollution as an environmental factor. This study examines the causal effect of air pollution on robot adoption by Chinese firms, using imported robot data from 2000 to 2012. We employ annual thermal inversion days as an instrument to perform a 2SLS estimation and find that air pollution positively affects firms' robot adoption in terms of probability and quantity. Reduced labor productivity and raised labor costs drive the documented impacts. Cross-sectionally, the observed effect is only significant for non-state-owned firms, firms in industries with more automation opportunities, and firms in areas with greater financial accessibility. Further analysis suggests a positive relationship between air pollution and firms’ automation levels.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48419,"journal":{"name":"Economic Modelling","volume":"143 ","pages":"Article 106957"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7000,"publicationDate":"2025-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Economic Modelling","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264999324003146","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2024/11/29 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Studies exploring the determinants of robot adoption are scarce, and majority of the literature attributes robot adoption to economic and social factors related to labor costs, neglecting the impact of air pollution as an environmental factor. This study examines the causal effect of air pollution on robot adoption by Chinese firms, using imported robot data from 2000 to 2012. We employ annual thermal inversion days as an instrument to perform a 2SLS estimation and find that air pollution positively affects firms' robot adoption in terms of probability and quantity. Reduced labor productivity and raised labor costs drive the documented impacts. Cross-sectionally, the observed effect is only significant for non-state-owned firms, firms in industries with more automation opportunities, and firms in areas with greater financial accessibility. Further analysis suggests a positive relationship between air pollution and firms’ automation levels.
期刊介绍：
Economic Modelling fills a major gap in the economics literature, providing a single source of both theoretical and applied papers on economic modelling. The journal prime objective is to provide an international review of the state-of-the-art in economic modelling. Economic Modelling publishes the complete versions of many large-scale models of industrially advanced economies which have been developed for policy analysis. Examples are the Bank of England Model and the US Federal Reserve Board Model which had hitherto been unpublished. As individual models are revised and updated, the journal publishes subsequent papers dealing with these revisions, so keeping its readers as up to date as possible.
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