Abstract:

This paper systematically examines how workplace automation impacts energy poverty from a demand-side perspective, revealing a new challenge for Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG 7) in the context of technological revolution. Our research demonstrates that workplace automation significantly increases household energy poverty. This finding is robust when using the instrumental variable approach to tackle endogeneity, as well as employing different automation and energy poverty measures, placebo tests, and machine learning methods for robustness checks. Automation's impact mechanism is that it reduces people's income and work-related social capital, thus exposing households to higher risks of energy poverty. Moreover, its consequences are more prominent for rural households, less educated people, non-migrants, those without labor contracts, non trade-union members,