Umblijs Janis, Østbakken Kjersti Misje
Institute for Social Research, Oslo, Norway.
Norwegian Social Research (NOVA), Oslo Metropolitan University, Oslo, Norway.
Health Econ. 2025 Oct;34(10):1882-1906. doi: 10.1002/hec.70010. Epub 2025 Jul 7.
This paper studies how the introduction of industrial robots affects sickness absence among workers in the manufacturing sector in Norway. We use data on the imports of industrial robots at the firm level, combined with employee-firm linked register data, to investigate the impact of robotization on the duration of sick leave (SL). We find that robotization leads to a statistically significant increase in SL duration of approximately 1.7 days. Workers in blue-collar occupations are especially negatively affected, and among this group those with routine tasks experience even higher levels of SL following robotization, with an average increase of around 5 days. We conduct additional analyses looking at different categories of diagnoses across various occupation groups and find heterogeneous effects. Our results suggest that for blue-collar and routine workers robotization leads to increased musculoskeletal SL, while we only observe an increase in injuries for STEM workers, with maintenance engineers especially negatively affected. Our findings suggest several mechanisms that differ by type of occupation, ranging from musculoskeletal diagnoses caused by repetitive strain to an increase in injuries resulting from working directly with the newly installed industrial robots.
本文研究了工业机器人的引入如何影响挪威制造业工人的病假情况。我们使用企业层面的工业机器人进口数据,并结合员工与企业关联的登记数据,来调查机器人化对病假时长的影响。我们发现,机器人化导致病假时长在统计上显著增加,约为1.7天。蓝领职业的工人受到的负面影响尤其大,在这一群体中,从事常规任务的工人在机器人化之后病假水平更高,平均增加约5天。我们针对不同职业群体的不同诊断类别进行了额外分析,发现了异质性影响。我们的结果表明,对于蓝领和从事常规工作的工人来说,机器人化导致肌肉骨骼病假增加,而我们仅观察到从事科学、技术、工程和数学(STEM)工作的工人受伤病假增加,其中维修工程师受到的负面影响尤其大。我们的研究结果表明了几种因职业类型而异的机制,从重复性劳损导致的肌肉骨骼诊断到直接操作新安装的工业机器人而导致的受伤增加。