Sick of Robots – Heterogeneous Effects of Industrial Robots on Sickness Absence

This paper studies how the introduction of industrial robots affects sickness absence among workers in the manufacturing sector in Norway. We use data on the imports of industrial robots at the firm level, combined with employee-firm linked register data, to investigate the impact of robotisation on the incidence and duration of sick leave. We find that robotisation leads to a statistically significant increase in the duration of sick leave spells, with robotisation leading to an average increase of a day and a half of sick leave per year. Workers in blue-collar occupations are especially negatively affected, and among this group those with routine tasks experience even higher levels of sick leave following robotisation, with an average increase of around four days. We conduct additional analyses looking separately at different categories of diagnoses across various occupation groups and find heterogeneous effects.