Template-Type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0
Author-Name: Fabio Montobbio
Author-X-Name-First: Fabio
Author-X-Name-Last: Montobbio
Author-Email: fabio.montobbio@unicatt.it
Author-Workplace-Name: Dipartimento di Politica Economica, DISCE, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore – BRICK, Collegio Carlo Alberto, Torino – ICRIOS, Bocconi University, Milano
Author-Name: Jacopo Staccioli
Author-X-Name-First: Jacopo
Author-X-Name-Last: Staccioli
Author-Email: jacopo.staccioli@unicatt.it
Author-Workplace-Name: Dipartimento di Politica Economica, DISCE, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore – Institute of Economics, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa
Author-Name: Maria Enrica Virgillito
Author-X-Name-First: Maria Enrica
Author-X-Name-Last: Virgillito
Author-Email: mariaenrica.virgillito@santannapisa.it
Author-Workplace-Name: Institute of Economics, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa – Dipartimento di Politica Economica, DISCE, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
Author-Name: Marco Vivarelli
Author-X-Name-First: Marco
Author-X-Name-Last: Vivarelli
Author-Email: marco.vivarelli@unicatt.it
Author-Workplace-Name: Dipartimento di Politica Economica, DISCE, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore – UNU-MERIT, Maastricht, The Netherlands – IZA, Bonn, Germany
Title: Robots and the origin of their labour saving impact
Abstract: This paper investigates the presence of explicit labour-saving heuristics within robotic patents. It analyses innovative actors engaged in robotic technology and their economic environment (identity, location, industry), and identifies the technological fields particularly exposed to labour-saving innovations. It exploits advanced natural language processing and probabilistic topic modelling techniques on the universe of patent applications at the USPTO between 2009 and 2018, matched with ORBIS (Bureau van Dijk) firm-level dataset. The results show that labour-saving patent holders comprise not only robots producers, but also adopters. Consequently, labour-saving robotic patents appear along the entire supply chain. The paper shows that labour-saving innovations challenge manual activities (e.g. in the logistics sector), activities entailing social intelligence (e.g. in the healthcare sector) and cognitive skills (e.g. learning and predicting).
Length: 32
Creation-Date: 2020-03
File-URL: http://dipartimenti.unicatt.it/politica-economica-DIPE0009.pdf
File-Format: Application/pdf
File-Function: First version, 2020
Number: dipe0009
Classification-JEL: O33, J24, C38
Keywords: Robotic Patents, Labour-Saving Technology, Search Heuristics, Probabilistic Topic Models
Handle: RePEc:ctc:serie5:dipe0009