Small cities face greater impact from automation
Morgan R. Frank, Lijun Sun, Manuel Cebrian, Hyejin Youn, Iyad Rahwan
TL;DR
This paper compares how automation impacts employment in U.S. cities, finding small cities face greater disruptions while large cities develop specialized, less automatable occupational profiles.
Contribution
It provides the first empirical analysis linking urban size to differential automation impacts on employment, highlighting the role of occupational specialization.
Findings
Small cities experience greater worker displacement due to automation.
Large cities develop specialized, less automatable job sectors.
Results are robust across various checks.
Abstract
The city has proven to be the most successful form of human agglomeration and provides wide employment opportunities for its dwellers. As advances in robotics and artificial intelligence revive concerns about the impact of automation on jobs, a question looms: How will automation affect employment in cities? Here, we provide a comparative picture of the impact of automation across U.S. urban areas. Small cities will undertake greater adjustments, such as worker displacement and job content substitutions. We demonstrate that large cities exhibit increased occupational and skill specialization due to increased abundance of managerial and technical professions. These occupations are not easily automatable, and, thus, reduce the potential impact of automation in large cities. Our results pass several robustness checks including potential errors in the estimation of occupational automation…
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