Claire Lelarge

Université Paris-Saclay, Centre for Economic Policy Research, Banque de France

Papers

Total Citations

424

H-Index

About

Claire Lelarge is an economist whose research sits at the intersection of labor economics, industrial organization, and the economics of technology adoption. She is best known for her pioneering firm-level analysis of automation and robotics in manufacturing, most prominently through her highly cited work "Competing with Robots: Firm-Level Evidence from France," which has garnered over 400 citations across its versions. This research offers a rare empirical window into how French manufacturing firms responded to robot adoption between 2010 and 2015, revealing that while only 598 out of 55,390 firms adopted robots during this period, these adopters represented a striking 20 percent of total manufacturing employment. Lelarge's findings demonstrate that robot-adopting firms experienced significant declines in labor shares and the proportion of production workers, contributing crucial evidence to global debates about automation's displacement effects on labor. By constructing novel datasets linking robot purchases to firm-level outcomes, her work has set a methodological benchmark for researchers studying technological change and its distributional consequences. Her contributions are particularly valuable for policymakers and scholars seeking to understand how advanced economies navigate the transition toward increasingly automated production systems.