A New Keynesian Model with Robots: Implications for Business Cycles and Monetary Policy

Abstract

This paper examines the effects of labor-replacing capital, referred to as robots, on business cycle dynamics using a New Keynesian model with a role for both traditional and robot capital. This study finds that shocks to the price of robots have effects on wages, output, and employment that are distinct from shocks to the price of traditional capital. Further, the inclusion of robots alters the response of employment and labor’s share to total factor productivity and monetary policy shocks. The presence of robots also weakens the correlation between human labor and output and the correlation between human labor and labor’s share. The paper finds that monetary policymakers would need to place a greater emphasis on output stabilization if their objective is to minimize a weighted average of output and inflation volatility. Moreover, if policymakers have an employment stabilization objective apart from their output stabilization objective, they would have to further focus on output stabilization due to the deterioration of the output-employment correlation.