Robots, Employment and Wages: Evidence from Turkish Labor Markets
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Abstract
This paper investigates how robotization affects local- and worker-level labor market outcomes in Turkey for 2014-2021. We estimate shift-share specifications, instrumenting Turkish industry-level robot adoption with the same indicator in eight leading European countries, utilising a combined dataset of administrative employer-employee data and industry-level robot stocks. Contrary to evidence from advanced economies, we find positive effects of robot exposure on district-level employment growth, concentrated in manufacturing and driven by the automotive industry. This pattern is consistent with the theoretical insight that the labor market effects of automation depend on an economy's position relative to the global productivity frontier. We complement the local-level analysis with an intensive-margin, worker-level exercise that tracks the 2014 manufacturing-worker cohort through 2021. The results reveal that incumbent workers in more-exposed industries experience a reduction in cumulative workdays at their original plants and are unlikely to transition outside manufacturing. The aggregate employment gains, therefore, accrue through firm expansion and new worker entry rather than through intensive-margin expansion of the incumbent workforce.
JEL Classification: J23, J24
Keywords: Robots; Employment; Wages; Automation; Turkish labor markets
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Aytun, U., Kılıçaslan, Y., Meçik, O. and Yapıcı, Ümit (2026) “Robots, Employment and Wages: Evidence from Turkish Labor Markets”, World Journal of Applied Economics, 12(1), pp. 43-63. doi: 10.22440/wjae.12.1.3.
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References
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Acemoglu, D., & Autor, D. (2011). Skills, tasks and technologies: Implications for employment and earnings. In D. Card & O. Ashenfelter (Eds.), Handbook of Labor Economics (Vol. 4, pp. 1043–1171). Elsevier. doi:10.1016/S0169-7218(11)02410-5
Acemoglu, D., Lelarge, C., & Restrepo, P. (2020). Competing with Robots: Firm-Level Evidence from France. AEA Papers and Proceedings, 110 , 383–88. doi:10.1257/PANDP.20201003
Acemoglu, D., & Restrepo, P. (2018). Demographics and robots (Working Paper, No. W24421). National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). http://www.nber.org/papers/w24421.
Acemoglu, D., & Restrepo, P. (2020). Robots and jobs: Evidence from us labor markets. Journal of Political Economy, 128 (6), 2188–2244. doi:10.1086/705716
Aghion, P., Antonin, C., Bunel, S., & Jaravel, X. (2020). What Are the Labor and Product Market Effects of Automation? New Evidence from France (No. 225). https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep51923.
Autor, D. H., Levy, F., & Murnane, R. J. (2003). The skill content of recent technological change: An empirical exploration. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118 (4), 1279–1333. doi:10.1162/003355303322552801
Bessen, J. (2019). Automation and jobs: when technology boosts employment*. Economic Policy, 34 (100), 589–626. doi:10.1093/epolic/eiaa001
Bessen, J., Goos, M., Salomons, A., & van den Berge, W. (2025). What Happens to Workers at Firms that Automate? The Review of Economics and Statistics, 107 (1), 125-141. doi:10.1162/rest a 01284
Bonfiglioli, A., Crin`o, R., Fadinger, H., & Gancia, G. (2020). Robot Imports and Firm-Level Outcomes. The Economic Journal, 134 (664), 3428–3444. doi:10.1093/ej/ueae055
Cali, M., & Presidente, G. (2022). Robots For Economic Development (Working Paper). ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics. https://hdl.handle.net/10419/249581.
Cheng, H., Jia, R., Li, D., & Li, H. (2019). The rise of robots in China. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 33 (2), 71–88. doi:10.1257/jep.33.2.71
Chiacchio, F., Petropoulos, G., & Pichler, D. (2018). The impact of industrial robots on EU employment and wages: A local labour market approach (Working Paper, No. 02). Bruegel. https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/207001/1/1028792522.pdf.
Dauth, W., Findeisen, S., Suedekum, J., & Woessner, N. (2018). Adjusting to Robots: Worker-Level Evidence (Working Papers, No. 13). Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. doi:10.21034/IWP.13
Dauth, W., Findeisen, S., Suedekum, J., & Woessner, N. (2021). The Adjustment of Labor Markets to Robots. Journal of the European Economic Association, 19 (6), 3104–3153. doi:10.1093/JEEA/JVAB012
Dixit, A. K., & Stiglitz, J. E. (1977). Monopolistic competition and optimum product diversity. The American Economic Review, 67 (3), 297–308.
Dottori, D. (2021). Robots and employment: evidence from Italy. Economia Politica, 38 (2), 739–795. doi:10.1007/S40888-021-00223-X/TABLES/14
Faber, M. (2020). Robots and reshoring: Evidence from Mexican labor markets. Journal of International Economics, 127 , 103384. doi:10.1016/j.jinteco.2020.103384
Frey, C. B., & Osborne, M. A. (2017). The future of employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation? Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 114 , 254–280. doi:10.1016/j.techfore.2016.08.019
Giuntella, O., & Wang, T. (2019). Is an Army of Robots Marching on Chinese Jobs? (Discussion Paper, No. 12281). IZA. https://docs.iza.org/dp12281.pdf.
Graetz, G., & Michaels, G. (2018). Robots at work. Review of Economics and Statistics, 100 (5), 753–768. doi:10.1162/rest_a_00754
Griliches, Z. (1969). Capital-skill complementarity. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 51 (4), 465–468. doi:10.2307/1926439
Jager, K. (2016). EU KLEMS growth and productivity accounts 2016 release - Description of Methodology and General Notes. https://dataverse.nl/api/access/datafile/357095.
Keynes, J. M. (2010). Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren. In Essays in Persuasion (pp. 321–332). Palgrave Macmillan, London. doi:10.1007/978-1-349-59072-8 25
Klenert, D., Fernandez-Macias, E., & Anton, J.-I. (2022). Do robots really destroy jobs? Evidence from Europe. Economic and Industrial Democracy, 0143831X2110688. doi:10.1177/0143831X211068891
Melitz, M. J. (2003). The Impact of Trade on Intra-Industry Reallocations and Aggregate Industry Productivity. Econometrica, 71 (6), 1695–1725. doi:10.1111/1468-0262.00467
Mihaylov, E., & Tijdens, K. G. (2019). Measuring the routine and non-routine task content of 427 four-digit isco-08 occupations (Discussion Paper, No. 2019-035/V). Tinbergen Institute. https://papers.tinbergen.nl/19035.pdf.
Piore, M. J., & Sabel, C. F. (1984). The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity (No. 171). Columbia Law School, Faculty Books. https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/171.
Tuhkuri, J. (2022). Essays on Technology and Work (Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology). https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/144769.