Robots, Employment and Wages: Evidence from Turkish Labor Markets
Uğur Aytun, Yılmaz Kılıçaslan, Oytun Meçi̇k, Ümit Yapıcı · World Journal of Applied Economics · 11 Jun 2026
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Where this sits in the debate
- Will AI destroy more jobs than it creates? · its finding goes against the claim (why studies differ)
- Will AI widen inequality?
Direction of the finding as read from the abstract by an AI model (AI-written).
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.
About this publication
Academic journal. Published in an academic journal — typically peer-reviewed before publication, though indexing alone doesn't guarantee review depth.
- Published
- 2026 (4 months ago)
- Citations
- 0 (OpenAlex)
0 citations recorded by OpenAlex — too few 2026 papers in this collection for a fair comparison.
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