My recent paper with David Neumark in labor economics is therefore timely given that we investigate whether minimum-wage changes in the past have caused an acceleration of automation that changed the type of work available for low-skilled workers. In the past, jobs that can be replaced by technology have largely been those that involve a repeated sequence of actions and are easily codifiable. Drawing on U.S. population data from 1980-2015 and a classification for automatable work introduced by Autor and Dorn (2013), we find that a 10-percent increase in the minimum wage leads to a 0.31 percentage point decrease in the share of automatable jobs done by low-skilled workers overall.

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