Elizabeth F. Bair

University of Pennsylvania, California University of Pennsylvania

Papers

Total Citations

H-Index

About

Elizabeth F. Bair is an emerging scholar whose research sits at the critical intersection of labor economics, public health, and social inequality in the United States. Her most notable work examines how structural economic transformations — particularly the rise of industrial automation — shape population health outcomes among working-age Americans. Bair's signature contribution, "Death by Robots? Automation and Working-Age Mortality in the United States," challenges and refines prevailing narratives around "deaths of despair" by rigorously investigating whether the displacement of manufacturing workers by industrial robots drives worsening mortality trends. This provocative and timely research has garnered significant scholarly attention, accumulating 80 citations across its iterations and establishing Bair as a serious voice in debates about deindustrialization and public health. By linking macroeconomic forces — specifically automation technology — to individual mortality outcomes, her work offers policymakers and researchers a more structurally grounded framework for understanding America's troubling life expectancy trends. For students and researchers interested in the human consequences of technological change and economic restructuring, Bair's scholarship represents an essential and empirically sophisticated entry point into these urgent contemporary questions.