Study links minimum wage hikes to faster robot adoption on factory floors

Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson published a new NBER paper finding that minimum wage increases accelerate the adoption of industrial robots in manufacturing. Combined with his August 2025 study showing AI has already cut entry-level white-collar employment by 13%, the research paints a picture of workers being squeezed from both ends. The paper traces a labor market transformation where AI encroaches on knowledge work from the top while automation moves in from the bottom. Brynjolfsson's dataset of high-frequency payroll records from millions of workers makes these among the most empirically grounded studies of AI's labor impact.

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