@article{68d622840c1f4d658f384f38c2a70338,
title = "Growth, automation, and the long-run share of labor",
abstract = "We study the long run implications of workplace automation induced by capital accumulation. We describe a minimal set of sufficient conditions for sustained growth, along with a declining labor share of income in the long run: (i) a basic asymmetry between physical and human capital; (ii) the technical possibility of automation in each sector; (ii) a self-replication condition on the production function for robot services; (iv) asymptotic homotheticity (more generally neutrality) of demand, and (v) a minimal degree of patience or intergenerational altruism among a fraction of households. However, the displacement of human labor is gradual, and absolute real wages could rise indefinitely. The results obtain in the absence of any technical progress; they extend to endogenous technical progress even if such progress is not biased ex ante in favor of automation.",
keywords = "Automation, Factor shares, Human capital, Inequality, Technical progress",
author = "Debraj Ray and Dilip Mookherjee",
note = "Funding Information: Neither author has any conflict of interest to disclose. Mookherjee thanks the Department of Economics at NYU for hosting his visit in Fall 2017 when this project was started. Ray acknowledges funding from the National Science Foundation under grant SES-1851758. We are grateful to Joshua Gans, Erik Madsen, Pascual Restrepo and Jeffrey Sachs for useful conversations, and to three anonymous referees for useful comments. Author names are in random order. Funding Information: Neither author has any conflict of interest to disclose. Mookherjee thanks the Department of Economics at NYU for hosting his visit in Fall 2017 when this project was started. Ray acknowledges funding from the National Science Foundation under grant SES-1851758 . We are grateful to Joshua Gans, Erik Madsen, Pascual Restrepo and Jeffrey Sachs for useful conversations, and to three anonymous referees for useful comments. Author names are in random order. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2021 Elsevier Inc.",
year = "2021",
doi = "10.1016/j.red.2021.09.003",
language = "English (US)",
journal = "Review of Economic Dynamics",
issn = "1094-2025",
publisher = "Academic Press Inc.",
}