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The Growth Lab Research Seminar series is a weekly seminar that brings together researchers from across the academic spectrum who share an interest in growth and development.
Whether attending in-person or virtually, please register in advance. Room attendance is limited to the Harvard community. Seating availability is based on a first-come, first-served basis. The Zoom webinar is open to the public.
Speaker: Rodimiro Rodrigo, Assistant Professor at George Washington University School of Business.
Abstract: Major technological changes have come with an adjustment period of stagnant productivity before the economy operates at its full potential. The mechanism of this adoption process is still not well understood. In this seminar, Rodimiro Rodrigo will present his research on how productivity increases with a five-year lag after adopting industrial robots in Brazilian local labor markets. Combining employer-employee matched data with a novel measure of robot adoption, he provides evidence of establishment-level labor reorganization and organizational capital depreciation induced by the automation process. He examines a model that highlights the role of organizational costs accompanying the adoption of new technologies, illustrating its usefulness by using it to characterize the implications of the “innovator’s dilemma.”