Scholars and the Machine, on automation and academic performance

A central concern in economics, especially in times of major technological innovations, such as the development of AI, is whether these innovations complement or substitute workers’ skills, thus enhancing or reducing workers’ productivity. However, occupational output is often hard to measure, especially for high-skilled workers performing abstract tasks, making it hard to assess the impact of technology on productivity. In this paper, we overcome this issue by studying how the arrival of technological innovation has impacted productivity and inequality within a specific high-skilled group, that of economics researchers. Specifically, we focus on the introduction of DYNARE, a software designed to solve and simulate dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models. To identify the causal effect of DYNARE, we exploit the fact that its adoption was more likely in certain fields than in others. Leveraging this variation in a difference-in-difference approach, we find an increase in the average number of publications in the treated field, consistent with DYNARE boosting scholars’ productivity. Importantly, we also find an increase in the number of citations received, but this increase is mainly observed in lower-ranked papers, suggesting that DYNARE helped to reduce citation inequality among researchers in the same field.