劳动保护、特定技能依赖与工业机器人兴起

Labour Protection,Dependence on Specific Skills and the Rise of Industrial Robots

本文从劳动力特定技能视角探索了各国在劳动保护制度上的差异对工业机器人兴起的影响。我们在不完全信息的纳什博弈模型中构建了劳动力特定技能获取与企业的机器人决策模型,从特定技能提升效应和机器人替代效应两个角度建立了劳动保护与工业机器人兴起的理论关系,并采用1993-2019年的跨国数据构建广义双重差分模型,识别了劳动保护对工业机器人兴起的影响。研究发现:劳动保护对工业机器人兴起的影响并不显著,但在加入劳动保护与行业特定技能依赖度的交互项后,劳动保护的提高在特定技能依赖度更高的行业中对工业机器人兴起产生了更突出的负向影响,提升劳动力特定技能也是化解工业机器人兴起对劳动力市场冲击的重要途径。这一结果在考虑变量测度、内生性问题并排除了其他竞争性假设后都是稳健的。此外,我们聚焦中国实情,利用《劳动合同法》实施作为准自然实验,从微观企业层面探究劳动保护对中国工业机器人兴起的影响,验证了本文理论模型在中国的适用性。

Focusing on workforce-specific skills,this paper investigates how differences in labour protection across countries shape patterns of increasing industrial robots.First,a decision-making model for the workforce-specific skill acquisition and firm robots is constructed based on a Nash game model with incomplete information,and the theoretical relationship between labour protection and the emergence of industrial robots is established from two different perspectives:the specific effect of skills improvement and the robot substitution effect.Subsequently,drawing on cross-country data from between 1993 and 2019,a generalised difference-in-differences(DID)model is constructed and the impact of labour protection on the increase in industrial robots is identified.The results of the research reveal that the impact of labour protection on industrial automation is not significant.However,clear evidence is provided that the adoption of industrial automation is significantly reduced in industries with greater reliance on specific skills,and that labour protection inhibits the substitution of labour by robots through the effect of specific skills.Workforce-specific upskilling also proves to be an important way to mitigate the impact of industrial automation on the labour market.After considering variable measurement bias,endogeneity issues,and the exclusion of other competing hypotheses,the conclusions remain robust.Finally,focusing on the Chinese context,the paper tests the applicability of the theoretical model in China using the Labour Contract Law implementation as a quasi-natural experiment to explore the impact of labour protection on the rise of industrial robots in China at both industrial and corporate levels.