automatic News for 11-19-2019

U.S. companies facing worker shortage race to automate

NEW YORK – U.S. companies are responding to the lowest unemployment rate in almost 50 years by increasing their focus on automation in order to maintain healthy margins as labor costs tick higher, a Reuters analysis of corporate earnings transcripts shows. Instead, companies appear to be confronting the lack of low-cost workers by investing in software and machines that can perform tasks ranging from human resources management to filling prescriptions. Health insurance company UnitedHealth Group told investors that its automation efforts should save the company over $1 billion next year. Corona beer brewer Constellation Brands Inc said that its spending on automation should increase the efficiency in which it packs bottles in a variety pack, shaving costs. 

Overall, companies have discussed automation on quarterly earnings calls more than 1,110 times since the beginning of the year, a 15% increase from this time last year and nearly double the mentions by this time in October, 2016, according to Refinitiv data. Corporate orders of robotics alone rose 7.2% over the first half of this year compared with 2018, totaling $869 million in spending, according to the Association for Advancing Automation. Fund managers and analysts say that corporate spending on automation is contributing to positive earnings surprises. Nearly 83% of companies in the S&P 500 that have release third quarter earnings so far have reported earnings above expectations, compared with an average 65% beat rate since 1994, according to I/B/E/S data from Refinitiv. Watson said that he is now buying companies that are benefiting from the use of automation because they trade at much more attractive valuations than the companies that provide it, which he is steering clear of. 

The fastest-growing sectors of automation are in logistics and healthcare, said Jeremie Capron, head of research at ROBO Global, the company behind the $1.2-billion Robo Global Robotics & Automation ETF. The firm’s ETF is up nearly 20% for the year to date, in line with the performance of the benchmark S&P 500 index. Capron sees the greatest opportunity in companies like Zebra Technologies Corp, which makes radio-frequency identification device readers and real-time location systems that are used in hospitals and e-commerce fulfillment centers, he said. Shares of the company are up nearly 30% for the year to date. 

Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

For a given size of national income, a drop in labor compensation reduces the labor share. A useful way to think about the labor share is that it is the ratio of real wages to labor productivity. As a result, the labor share would be constant if an increase in labor productivity were matched by an equal increase in real wages. The labor share would decline if real wages weren’t able to keep up with increases in labor productivity. As a benchmark, we use the measure of the labor share of the nonfarm business sector constructed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, shown in Figure 1. 

The significant decline in the labor share reflects that increases in real wages have not kept up with labor productivity improvements over the past two decades. In our recent work, we revisit the link between automation and the labor share in a more realistic model of the labor market. In contrast to traditional models with perfectly competitive labor markets, our model predicts that automation can lead to a decline in the labor share, along with stagnant wage growth. To assess the importance of automation for explaining the declines in the labor share, we estimate our model using quarterly data for unemployment, job vacancies, inflation-adjusted wage growth, and labor productivity growth. Fitting our model to the time series of labor productivity, along with the other labor market variables, helps quantify the role of automation. 

Figure 2 shows that the labor share in the special scenario with no changes in automation does not fluctuate over the business cycle; more importantly, the decline in the labor share would have been much more muted than in the actual data. Our model predicts that, without automation, the labor share at the end of 2018 would have stayed around 59.5%, much higher than the actual labor share of about 56%. Figure 2U.S. labor share: Actual versus scenario without automation. 

The better I got at python the more streamlined my analysis became, and I started to realize python was more than a tool that allowed me to create stunning visuals or perform high function mathematics. I began to explore more of the capabilities of python and started to realize I was merely scratching the surface with this language and I could actually start automating a few of the processes. Well, I am here to tell you I am still not a python software engineer, but I can automate processes to make my analysis more effective and become a more valuable team player. Take me as an example: When I learned I wasn’t utilizing all of the programming language potentials I immediately began to think about how I could effectively incorporate these concepts into my work to become more productive. The reporting, on the other hand, was not… 

I still had to take my visuals and paste them into a presentation and then send the email to the appropriate individuals. My end goal is: to create a pdf report, attach said report to an email and send the email all within python. DependenciesHere are the libraries and packages you will need to get your emails automated. I suggest going to the documentation of canvas if you want to learn more about creating more sophisticated pdf reports. Before we dive into the code you might want to make a burner email account so that you can test the email on your own email rather than a friend’s email. 

The code:# assign key email aspects to variables for easier future editing. Login(sender email, password) #login with mail id and password. Python is a wonderful tool to help make you more productive and efficient so take advantage of it!