IFR Best Paper Award goes to Ainhoa Urtasun
Award was presented for the very time at the CORA 2025
Sep 26, 2025 — Ainhoa Urtasun, Associate Professor at Universidad Pública de Navarra, received the first IFR Best Paper Award for her work on the introduction of robots in US manufacturing plants.
Her key findings are that robotization creates new opportunities for employment and skill development in adopting plants and firms.
More precisely, in plants that adopt robots, they find a 150% increase in job postings and 15% increase in employment compared to non-adopters (matched by industry and labor market). Employees working with robots face increasing skills requirements for design, maintenance and other technical skills.
Their findings also suggest that there are positive spillover effects also in other plants within the same firm even in those are not using robots, due to rising competitiveness.
In her working paper "Robots and Work", she and her coworkers Adrianto and Avner Ben-Ner also provide several policy recommendations for government, business and educational institutions:
- There is a need to support workers displaced by robotics, not so much in adopting plants but elsewhere in the economy.
- Provision of training for reskilling workers to transition into new roles created by automation.
- Relatedly, technical education should focus on programming, maintenance, and supervision of robotic systems and their integration with AI.
- Encourage robot adoption by firms by enhancing their technical and human resource capabilities.
- Improve data collection on robot adoption and its effects on employment to enable more detailed and comprehensive studies. It is important to support longitudinal studies to track the long-term impacts of robot adoption on different industries and regions.
For more details, refer to the working paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/D...
We will soon also publish a blog article by Ainhoa Urtasun about her work.
