Professors Daiji Kawaguchi and Yasutora Watanabe’s paper, “AI, Skill, and Productivity: The Case of Taxi Drivers,” has been published in the NBER Working Paper Series.
This paper has been written in collaboration with Associate Professor Hitoshi Shigeoka of Simon Fraser University.
Key points
- We demonstrated “how the impact of AI on productivity differs depending on the skill of workers” using detailed data on taxi drivers.
- Demand forecasting AI for taxi drivers improved their average productivity, but this effect was concentrated on low-skilled drivers.
- Conventional technologies such as IT and robots have deprived low-skilled workers of their jobs and caused widening income disparities, but the new AI technology can reduce that disparity.
Overview
Professor Daiji Kawaguchi and Professor Yasutora Watanabe of the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Public Policy, in collaboration with Associate Professor Hitoshi Shigeoka of Simon Fraser University, demonstrated how the impact of AI on productivity differs depending on the skill of workers using detailed data on taxi drivers.
The impact of AI on labor has been discussed in previous studies from the perspective of which occupations are particularly susceptible to the impact of AI. However, the impact of AI on labor is complex, and it may differ even among workers in the same occupation. Therefore, analysis of the impact of AI on worker productivity using detailed microdata at the individual worker level has been awaited. Hence, in this study, we analyzed the impact of demand forecasting AI on the productivity of taxi drivers and how it varies depending on the skill level of the drivers using detailed data on the taxi drivers.
The analysis results showed that the use of demand forecasting AI improved the productivity of low-skilled drivers by about 7%, while no significant impact was observed on the productivity of high-skilled drivers. Conventional technologies such as IT and robots have increased the productivity of high-skilled workers, which led to widening income disparity, but this study shows that the new AI technology has the potential to reduce disparity, which is an important finding when considering the future impact of AI on the economy.
Further information is available from the below link.
GraSPP Blog: AI, Skill, and Productivity: The Case of Taxi Drivers
NBER Working Paper Series
https://www.nber.org/papers/w30612
Contact:
Daiji Kawaguchi
Professor
Graduate School of Public Policy, The University of Tokyo
03-5841-5508
kawaguchi(at)e.u-tokyo.ac.jp