Nancey Green Leigh

Papers

Total Citations

145

H-Index

About

Nancey Green Leigh is a prominent urban and regional planning scholar whose research sits at the critical intersection of technology, manufacturing, and regional economic development. She has made pioneering contributions to understanding how robotics and artificial intelligence are reshaping labor markets and industrial landscapes across the United States, producing some of the earliest rigorous academic investigations into a field previously dominated by speculation rather than empirical evidence. Leigh's most influential work has systematically addressed the data vacuum surrounding robotics adoption, developing original survey methodologies and analytical frameworks to examine how automation technologies affect skill demand, employment, and regional competitiveness. Her 2017 study identifying emerging robotic regions in the United States (65 citations) broke important ground by constructing foundational datasets where none previously existed. Subsequent research explored how robots reshape skill demands in U.S. regional labor markets (52 citations) and, more recently, illuminated troubling disparities in robot adoption among manufacturers (28 citations), raising urgent questions about equity and economic development policy. Collectively, her work has reshaped scholarly and policy conversations about manufacturing's future, offering nuanced, data-driven perspectives that challenge both techno-optimist and techno-pessimist narratives and providing actionable insights for planners, policymakers, and regional economic development practitioners navigating an era of accelerating industrial transformation.