Liuchun Deng

Yale-NUS College, National University of Singapore, Halle Institute for Economic Research

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About

Liuchun Deng is an economist whose research sits at the intersection of automation, labor markets, and technological adoption. Working primarily with novel micro-level and digitalized industry datasets, Deng has made significant contributions to our understanding of how and why firms adopt industrial robots, and what consequences this has for workers. His most cited work, "Robot Adoption at German Plants" (2023, 28 citations), offers the first plant-level portrait of robotization in Germany, uncovering key stylized facts about the rarity and distribution of robot use between 2014 and 2018. Complementing this, his research on early Japanese robotization (9 citations) demonstrates that labor shortages — particularly among unskilled factory workers — were a significant driver of robot adoption between 1978 and 1991, adding important historical depth to automation debates. His work on robots, occupations, and worker age examines how robot adoption reshapes employment composition, finding that workers in less routine-task-intensive occupations fare comparatively better. Taken together, Deng's research provides both historical and contemporary microeconomic evidence on automation's causes and consequences, making him a valuable voice in the ongoing policy conversation about robots and the future of work.