Yong Suk Lee

University of Notre Dame, National Bureau of Economic Research

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About

Yong Suk Lee is a labor economist whose research sits at the cutting edge of automation, robotics, and workforce dynamics. His work makes significant contributions to our understanding of how technological change reshapes employment across both manufacturing and service sectors — a question of growing urgency as automation accelerates globally. Lee's most influential work, "The Evolving Impact of Robots on Jobs" (2022, 30 citations), examines how industrial robot adoption reshaped U.S. labor markets between 2005 and 2016, leveraging industry-level variation in robot intensity to trace effects on local employment. This methodological approach has helped establish a more nuanced picture of automation's uneven geographic and sectoral consequences. Perhaps most distinctively, Lee has pioneered research on service sector robotics — a comparatively underexplored frontier. His studies of Japanese nursing homes (2021, 22 citations; 2024, 8 citations) represent some of the first establishment-level investigations into how robots affect staffing, task composition, and productivity outside manufacturing. His finding that robot adoption can actually increase employment by augmenting workers' capabilities challenges simplistic displacement narratives. Collectively, Lee's research offers policymakers and scholars a richer, empirically grounded understanding of how automation transforms work across diverse economic contexts.