This grant funds work by economists Daron Acemoglu of MIT and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University, who are investigating the economics of robotics and automation. These two researchers have begun developing a conceptual framework to understand how robotics is affecting the economy. The effects of new automation technologies, they maintain, can best be understood by explicitly examining how fast and how thoroughly they replace human labor in the performance of specific tasks. One virtue of such a framework is that it helps distinguish between the “displacement effect” of automation—the way it can reduce demand for certain kinds of labor—and the “productivity effect” of automation—the way it can increase the value of certain sorts of labor by making laborers more productive. Using this framework, Acemoglu and Restrepo estimate that an increase of one new robot per thousand workers in the U.S. economy reduces the ratio of employment to population by 0.5 percentage points and reduces average wages by 1 percent in a local labor market with the average U.S. exposure to robots relative to a local labor market with no exposure to robots. Grant funds will support the extension and refinement of Acemoglu and Restrepo’s work, including plans to disaggregate effects across various labor markets by studying long-term and fine-grain data at the firm level. The project promises to generate at least six academic papers based on this work.