Working Paper Series,
Research Institute of Industrial Economics

Abstract: This paper examines how automation shapes intergenerational income mobility. Using Swedish register data on parents and children from 1985 to 2019, we study how parental exposure to robots at the occupational and industry level during the 1990s affected children’s outcomes up to thirty years later. To address selection, we match parents on detailed worker, firm, and family characteristics and complement this with firm-level variation based on robot and broader automation imports. We also employ two IV strategies that leverage exogenous variation in automation adoption: one based on foreign industry-level robot adoption, and another exploiting differences in managerial education at the firm level. Our results show that parental exposure to robotization and automation reduces children’s income and upward mobility, and leads to worse long-run labor market and educational outcomes. These effects are concentrated among low-income families. Evidence suggests that parental labor market shocks and financial strain are key mechanisms. Taken together, the findings indicate that technological change can reduce intergenerational mobility and contribute to long-run inequality.

Keywords: Intergenerational Mobility; Automation; Robots; Matched Employer-Employee Data

JEL-codes: J24; J31; J62; O33

Language: English

73 pages, First version: December 19, 2022. Revised: December 12, 2025. Earlier revisions: June 29, 2023.

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