The long-standing view in US economic history is that the shift in manufacturing in the nineteenth century from the hand labor artisan shop to the machine labor of the mechanized factory led to “labor de-skilling” – the substitution of less skilled workers, such as operatives, for skilled craft workers. Investigating the Department of Labor's 1899 Hand and Machine Labor Study, we show the adoption of inanimate power, which we call “mechanization,” did induce de-skilling at the production operation level. However, while the treatment effect of mechanization was economically and statistically significant, it accounted for only 16 percent of the de-skilling on average in the sample, using our preferred IV estimator. Broadening the scope of our inquiry, we find that variations in the division of labor, as captured by the share of production tasks performed by the average worker, accounted for a substantially larger fraction.

美国经济史中长期存在的观点是，十九世纪制造业从手工作坊向机械化工厂的机器劳动​​的转变导致了“劳动力去技能化”——技能较低的工人被取代，例如作为操作工，为熟练的手工艺工人。通过调查美国劳工部 1899 年的手工和机器劳动研究，我们发现，无生命力量（我们称之为“机械化”）的采用确实导致了生产操作层面的去技能化。然而，虽然机械化的治疗效果在经济上和统计上都很显着，但使用我们首选的 IV 估计器，它在样本中平均只占 16% 的去技能化。扩大我们的调查范围，我们发现，劳动分工的变化（以普通工人执行的生产任务的份额来衡量）所占的比例要大得多。