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The Effect of Robotization on Migration and Wage

Student: Baranova Polina

Supervisor: Alexander Skorobogatov

Faculty: St.Petersburg School of Economics and Management

Educational Programme: Economics (Bachelor)

Year of Graduation: 2019

The process of automation has a great impact on the labor market - in addi-tion to scientific research, this topic, commonly seen as apocalyptic head-lines in the yellow press, is also important for ordinary workers. In Russia, almost the same time as the whole world, technologies are developing, the speed of automation grows, so there is an assumption that robotization leads to an increase in demand for high skill workers, which in turn causes growth in income inequality — this effect is called skill biased technological change. After 1992, which is the starting point of the transition period of Russia, be-gan significant changes in the wages between more and less rich regions of Russia. In this work, we test the hypothesis whether robotization and auto-mation are the reasons of changes in the labor market, and whether there is a skill biased technological changes are observed. For these purposes we pro-pose the regression models, which explain the changes in wage levels for workers, wage distribution and the interregional migration. It was found that wage di-vergence is not observed in Russia, but there is convergence after 2000 year. However, there is not enough evidence to identify technologies as the main reason for convergence, since in addition to technological changes, the Rus-sian economy experienced significant structural changes after 2000, especial-ly in the areas of legislation and property rights. This conclusion is con-firmed by the observed negative skill premium after 2000, which contradicts the hypothesis about the effect of robotization on the labor market, which is usually seen as an increase in the skill premium due to the growing demand for highly skilled labor. Moreover, we calculate the probability whether a worker, depending on the level of his skills and profession, is a migrant in a territorial unit, depending on the composition of workers by skills and wages in the area.

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