Let me inform you of the following research seminar.

Date: April 25 (Thu.) , 2024
Time: 5:20PM - 6:50PM
Venue: 11th Floor, Bldg.No.2 Meeting Room B & ZOOM (HyFlex)
Speaker: Masahiro Yoshida (Waseda University)
Organizer: Masaki Takahashi
Language: English

Title: Immigration, Robots and the American Life

Abstract: Foreign labor represents a growing fraction of risky occupations that appear to be close substitutes of industrial robots. I investigate how dependency on immigrants interacted with robot adoption shaped a workplace injury risk in high-hazard sectors. Associating a wave of unskilled immigrants and workplace injuries across U.S. industries during 1992-2019, I find that immigrant workers substantially replaced native fatalities by crowding out natives out of risky jobs. Associated with cross-industry investment of industrial robots, I also find that robot installation dramatically reduced injury risk, but the aggregate nationwide risk remains unabated from poor investments to riskier labor-intensive sectors (e.g. agriculture and construction). Then, I test a hypothesis that immigration inflow impeded the automation and preserved an injury risk for remaining laborers, including natives. Over-dependency on foreign labor may preserve the risky technology generating a social cost (e.g., disabilities; usage of opioids). 

* Please contact the organizer via email, if you'd like to participate in the online seminar.
   If you are interested in upcoming seminars, please visit the website of SIHS Seminar Series.