Do Robots Complement or Substitute for Older Workers?

The impact of robotization on labor market outcomes has been recently empirically investigated alongseveral directions, including employment, wages and labor productivity. This work contributes to thisliterature by looking for heterogeneous effects of robots on the workforce, analyzed by age cohorts. Relyingon a panel of data from IFR (2019) and EU KLEMS (2009) over the years 1994-2005, we find consistentevidence of higher complementarity between robots and older workers (hours worked by employees aged 50and over), and a greater substitutability among robots and younger cohorts of the labor market. Thesefindings are robust to age group disaggregation and specific capital price deflators.