Data and Code for: Robot Hubs: The Skewed Distribution of Robots in U.S. Manufacturing

New technologies drive productivity growth (Romer 1990). Preliminary evidence using national-level data from 17 countries between 1993 and 2007 suggests that robots, like prior generations of general-purpose technologies, are also driving productivity growth (Graetz &amp; Michaels 2018). Moreover, according to data compiled by the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), since 2010 the number of robot shipments has nearly quadrupled from about 100,000 to almost 400,000 per year, so the impact of robots on the economy is likely even greater. However, while robotics may be contributing to GDP growth at a national level, scholars are still working to understand how robots affect employment and other outcomes at other levels of analysis, leading to calls for establishment-level measures of robots and other new technologies (Brynjolfsson &amp; Mitchell 2017; Raj and Seamans 2019). <br><br>To address this need, the U.S. Census Bureau, working with external researchers, developed a series of questions on the adoption and use of robots. These questions have subsequently been included in the Annual Survey of Manufactures and other Census surveys (Buffington, Miranda &amp; Seamans 2018; Brynjolfsson et al. 2020; Acemoglu et al. 2022). In this paper we present results on the distribution of robots in U.S. manufacturing, using the new establishment-level microdata collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. We use the data to present several facts about the location and use of robots. <br><br>We find that the distribution of robots is highly skewed across locations, even accounting for the different mix of industry and manufacturing employment. Some locations - which we call “Robot Hubs” - have many more robots than one would expect after accounting for industry and manufacturing employment. We characterize these Robot Hubs along several industry, demographic, and institutional dimensions, and find that the presence of robot integrators and union membership are distinguishing features of Robot Hubs.