Macro Seminar - "SCHOLARS AND THE MACHINE - ON AUTOMATION AND ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE"

A central question in economics is whether technological innovations complement or substitute workers’ skills, thus enhancing or replacing workers’ productivity. However, occupational output is typically hard to measure, especially for high-skilled workers performing abstract tasks. In this paper, we focus on the

effect of technology on productivity and inequality within a specific high-skilled group, that of researchers in economics, for whom we collect the universe of research output (i.e. published papers) for the period 1990-2020. We use as case study the introduction of DYNARE, a software designed to easily solve and simulate dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. We develop a heteroegenous agents dynamic model of
research and citations accumulation, in which the arrival of the technology allows some researchers to perform more easily a subset of the tasks needed to write academic papers. Next, we test the model’s implications by leveraging quasi-experimental variation in DYNARE adoption across economic fields. We find that treated fields experience a statistically significant differential increase in the yearly number of publications with respect to untreated ones. Consistent with the predictions of the model, the increase in publication is driven by less productive scholars at the time of technology arrival, thus suggesting that the new technology led to a decrease in citation inequality.