Endogenous growth · validated knowledge · artificial intelligence

The Idea Factory Meets the AI Factory

What Paul Romer can teach us about growth after generative AI.

AI does not make ideas free. It changes the production function of discovery—and moves the binding constraint from generating plausible candidates toward validating, absorbing, coordinating, and diffusing reliable knowledge.

AuthorDr. Michael Schymura
Published5 August 2026 · 31 min
Research cut-off5 August 2026

Executive synthesis

The candidate and the idea

A model can be copied like an idea and consumed like a factory. That paradox is the best place to begin the economics of artificial intelligence. On a laptop screen, a frontier model looks almost weightless. One set of weights can be copied, adapted, fine-tuned, and embedded in thousands of products. Yet every useful interaction still draws on rival things: chips, electricity, memory, networks, data rights, engineers, evaluations and—more often than the demo admits—human judgment.

Paul Romer gave economics the language for the first half of that sentence. His 1990 model begins from a deceptively simple asymmetry: ideas are not like machines. A machine used in Ludwigshafen cannot simultaneously be used in Singapore. A formula, software architecture, chemical process, or organizational recipe can. Once discovered, the same idea can be applied again and again across rival labor and capital.[1] That is why ideas can create increasing returns even when ordinary production still faces scarcity.

Generative AI makes the distinction visible and then complicates it. A model can search papers, generate molecules, write simulation code, propose mechanisms, and rank experiments. But the economy does not consume hypotheses. It consumes medicines that survive trials, materials that survive stress, code that survives integration, and decisions that survive contact with reality. The output of a model is not yet an addition to the productive knowledge stock. It is a candidate.

The thesis of this essay is therefore demanding but measurable. AI matters for growth when it increases the flow of validated, adopted, recombinable knowledge and when that knowledge diffuses widely enough to compound. Candidate abundance is not irrelevant. It is simply upstream of the economic object we ultimately care about.

Romer 1990 · reconstructed

The loop that moved technology inside economics

Select a stage. Romer separates the reusable design from the rival object built with it, then lets the accumulated stock of designs make tomorrow's research more productive.

Research sector

Purposeful effort

Research human capital combines with the inherited knowledge stock. Existing ideas are both an input into discovery and the record of solved problems.

New knowledge feeds back into the next research cycle

Section 01

What Romer changed

Solow explained why capital deepening alone cannot sustain growth in output per person. Diminishing returns pull the economy toward a steady state unless an external technology term keeps improving. The model was analytically powerful and intellectually unfinished: the most important source of long-run growth arrived from outside the system.

Romer moved technical change inside. Firms and researchers allocate scarce human capital to invent new designs because those designs can earn rents. The stock of designs raises the productivity of production and future research. Growth becomes endogenous not because scarcity disappears, but because one output of investment—knowledge—scales differently from ordinary inputs.

Romer's original research technology
(1)
A˙t=δHA,tAt\dot{A}_t = \delta H_{A,t} A_t

Research human capital and the inherited stock of knowledge jointly produce new designs.

Proportional growth of the knowledge stock
(2)
gA,tA˙tAt=δHA,tg_{A,t} \equiv \frac{\dot{A}_t}{A_t}=\delta H_{A,t}

With a constant research allocation, the benchmark can sustain a constant proportional growth rate.

The multiplication by A encodes “standing on shoulders.” A discovery is not only an output; it becomes an input into future discovery. This is the intellectual source of many AI growth forecasts even when Romer is never mentioned. If machines become research workers, Hᴬ or δ may rise. If they can draw on accumulated codified knowledge, standing on shoulders may become easier. If AI helps improve the process that improves AI, the feedback can become recursive.

But Romer’s equation is a benchmark, not a law of nature. Research teams duplicate effort, scientific fields become harder to master, distant knowledge is costly to absorb, and more researchers do not always produce proportionately more validated discoveries. Jones’s semi-endogenous response allows both research congestion and a less-than-proportional contribution from the existing stock.[2][3]

Semi-endogenous idea production
(3)
A˙t=δRtλAtϕ,0<λ1,  ϕ<1\dot{A}_t=\delta R_t^{\lambda}A_t^{\phi},\qquad 0<\lambda\leq 1,\;\phi<1

Lambda captures duplication and congestion; phi separates standing on shoulders from fishing out and the burden of knowledge.

Section 02

The three-sector economy

Romer’s economy connects final output, intermediate producer durables, and research. Competitive final-goods firms combine labor, human capital, and a continuum of specialized capital goods indexed by the number of available designs. More variety makes the rival factors more productive. The mechanism is not “more patents” as an accounting exercise; it is a better toolkit that allows production to be divided into more precisely differentiated tasks.

Final output with differentiated producer durables
(4)
Yt=HY,tαLtβ0Atxt(i)1αβdiY_t=H_{Y,t}^{\alpha}L_t^{\beta}\int_0^{A_t}x_t(i)^{1-\alpha-\beta}\,\mathrm{d}i

A is the measure of available designs; x(i) is the rival durable embodying design i.

A successful inventor owns the right to use a design and can sell or rent the corresponding durable. Downward-sloping demand permits a markup over marginal cost. That temporary monopoly rent is not an accidental blemish. It is the financing mechanism for fixed-cost invention. The same markup also restricts use below the social optimum.

The model therefore contains two classic welfare wedges. Inventors cannot capture all the value their design provides to future researchers, so knowledge spillovers push the social return above the private return. At the same time, exclusion and monopoly pricing suppress diffusion. Stronger property rights can finance more upstream invention while slowing downstream recombination. Weaker rights can accelerate reuse while starving expensive frontier work of appropriable returns.

Interactive figure · non-rivalry

Copy the recipe, not the factory

A design carries a fixed discovery cost but can serve many users at almost zero copying cost. A machine must be reproduced for every user. Scale spreads the cost of the idea; it does not abolish the rival capital that embodies it.

6

Non-rival design

20.2

cost units per use

Rival machine

24.0

cost units per use

7
8
9
10
11
12

At 6 users, the reusable design costs 1.2× less per use than reproducing the rival asset.

Artificial intelligence sharpens rather than resolves the tension. Open weights can be copied, inspected and localized. Training them remains expensive. Inference remains capacity constrained. Proprietary data and expert validation remain scarce. Openness changes one boundary of excludability and often moves rents downstream—from model creation toward compute, applications, data, integration, evaluation and trusted domain institutions.

Section 03

A modern research production function

An AI-era extension must unpack the machine term into tasks, complementarity and validation. Begin with semi-endogenous knowledge production, then let effective research be an aggregate of task outputs. Some tasks are technically feasible for machines, some remain human, and many require combinations of both.

Validated knowledge production
(5)
A˙t=δAtϕRtλVt\dot{A}_t=\delta A_t^{\phi}R_t^{\lambda}V_t

V is the rate at which generated output survives verification, becomes usable knowledge, and diffuses into the productive stock.

Research-task aggregator
(6)
Rt=[01rt(j)θ1θdj]θθ1R_t=\left[\int_0^1 r_t(j)^{\frac{\theta-1}{\theta}}\,\mathrm{d}j\right]^{\frac{\theta}{\theta-1}}

Low theta creates an O-ring process: weak stages dominate the aggregate and narrow machine excellence cannot substitute for them.

Benjamin Jones organizes the machine contribution around three parameters: γ, the share of research tasks AI can perform; M, machine productivity on those tasks; and θ, the substitutability among stages.[7] The triad converts a capability score into an economic production system. A machine that is one thousand times better at literature search can generate only a modest end-to-end gain if experimental design, physical testing or interpretation remains the weak link.

The fourth parameter is V: epistemic proof, engineering reliability, institutional acceptability and adoption. It is not an ethics appendix. It is the conversion rate from plausible output to productive knowledge. A false result can have negative social value; a correct result that no organization can absorb has little realized value; a reliable design that remains locked inside one firm creates private value without the full Romerian spillover.

Live model · not a forecast

Run the idea factory

The same machine can produce a modest level shift or a persistent acceleration. The difference lies in task coverage, complementarity, validation, and how strongly new knowledge raises future research productivity.

1.61×

effective research tasks

138

knowledge index · year 40

0.81%

annualized knowledge growth

46%

candidate survival

0Year 40145100AI-assisted validated knowledgeNo AI task coverage

Candidate flow

2.31

plausible additions per model period

Validation gap

1.25

candidates that do not enter usable knowledge

Machine productivity matters. But when tasks are complements, broad coverage and validation determine whether the curve bends.

Section 04

The validation economy

When generation becomes cheap, the shadow price moves to trusted evidence, test capacity, provenance and accountable judgment. A useful decomposition treats validation as a chain rather than a single score. Epistemic validation asks whether the result survives replication and adversarial review. Engineering validation asks whether it can be embodied reliably at acceptable cost and latency. Institutional validation asks whether it is legal, safe, auditable and insurable. Adoption asks whether organizations possess the skills, incentives and complementary capital to use it.

The multiplicative validation chain
(7)
Vt=v1,tv2,tv3,tv4,tV_t=v_{1,t}\,v_{2,t}\,v_{3,t}\,v_{4,t}

If an essential stage approaches zero, its contribution to the usable knowledge stock approaches zero.

AI research funnel · illustrative

Generation is not yet knowledge

AI can widen the top of the funnel. The growth effect is governed by throughput at the narrowest complementary stage—not by proposal volume.

Shadow price moves to

Experiment and replication

  1. Stage 01

    Generated candidates

    Starting candidate pool

    1,000

    100% of initial

  2. Stage 02

    Screened proposals

    58% pass-through from prior stage

    580

    58% of initial

  3. Stage 03Binding drop

    Experiments / simulations

    53.4% pass-through from prior stage

    310

    31% of initial

  4. Stage 04

    Validated knowledge

    58.1% pass-through from prior stage

    180

    18% of initial

  5. Stage 05

    Adopted innovation

    55.6% pass-through from prior stage

    100

    10% of initial

10%

Final yield

900

Candidates filtered

53.4%

Binding pass-through

Illustrative conversion from 1,000 machine-generated candidates

Multiplicative notation is intentional. A wet lab does not become one hundred times larger because the hypothesis queue does. A regulator does not approve one hundred times faster because candidate generation accelerated. A senior scientist does not gain one hundred times more attention. Cheap cognition can therefore increase the value of laboratories, simulations, benchmarks, trusted data, expert review and regulatory science.

The product-design implication follows Bryan and Gans: an AI prediction is one component in a composite experiment involving human verification and other information.[10] Maximizing standalone accuracy can be inferior to creating errors that are legible, calibrated, differently correlated from human errors, and cheap to verify. The economically valuable model is the model that improves the human–machine system.

Recent scientific-agent releases illustrate the frontier and the constraint. Workflow-shaped benchmarks now test evidence handling, analysis and operations rather than textbook questions.[17] Agentic coding can modernize scientific software, while systems such as EvoLib explore how inference-time experience becomes reusable skill.[18][20] Yet biological-agent work still finds reliability limits in real dataset construction.[19] Capability expands the feasible set; validation determines how much enters A.

Section 05

Three ways AI can affect growth

  1. One

    A level effect

    AI reduces the cost of existing research tasks and creates a one-time rise in useful knowledge. Output moves to a higher path; the long-run growth rate returns to its prior value.

  2. Two

    A growth-rate effect

    AI permanently raises research productivity, expands task coverage, improves validation, or lowers the burden of knowledge. The flow of validated ideas grows faster.

  3. Three

    A recursive research-technology effect

    AI improves the algorithms, experiments and tools that improve AI-assisted research itself. The process for improving the process begins to accelerate.

Research technology becomes endogenous
(8)
δ˙t=ψF ⁣(AI research,human judgment,compute,data,evaluation)\dot{\delta}_t=\psi\,F\!\left(\text{AI research},\,\text{human judgment},\,\text{compute},\,\text{data},\,\text{evaluation}\right)

Recursive improvement is powerful only when capability translates into broad, reliable research-task coverage.

Charles Jones emphasizes that weak links can delay aggregate benefits even when selected capabilities become superhuman.[8] The right diagnostic question is therefore temporal: does the system improve one research cycle, every future cycle, or the mechanism by which future cycles improve? These are different claims, different models and different evidentiary burdens.

Most copilots currently look like a mixture of level and transition effects. A durable growth-rate effect requires persistence: lower discovery cost after model migration, broader task coverage over time, reusable organizational memory, and a validation system that scales with candidate generation. Recursive acceleration requires more still—the weak links themselves must become automatable without reliability collapsing.

Section 06

Romerian in the weights, Solovian in the world

The phrase identifies a layered production structure. Model weights, code and protocols can be largely non-rival once created. Training compute, inference capacity, electricity, networks and cooling are rival. Enterprise context is partly reusable within the firm but bounded by permissions and semantics. Validation often consumes scarce experts, laboratories and regulatory capacity. Diffusion requires skills, standards and organizational capital.

LayerEconomic characterScarce complementsLikely rents
Weights / codeNon-rival; excludability variesTalent · training data · frontier computeDeveloper · platform · ecosystem
Serving / inferenceRival and capacity constrainedAccelerators · electricity · memory · networksCloud · chip · energy · operations
Enterprise contextReusable locally; legally boundedPermissions · semantics · provenanceData owner · integrator · application
ValidationStrongly rival in many domainsExperts · labs · test environments · auditsTrusted institutions · domain specialists
DiffusionShareable knowledge; costly absorptionSkills · management · standardsComplement providers · capable adopters

Open weights do not convert the whole system into a public good. They move one boundary of exclusion. Copying cost can approach zero while operating, adapting, proving and governing remain expensive. The best policy question is therefore not “open or closed?” It is which components should be open, when, to whom, under what liability, and with which mechanisms to finance creation and independent verification.

This layered view also explains simultaneous concentration and democratization. Fixed-cost frontier creation may centralize. APIs and open artifacts can democratize downstream recombination. The same technology can strengthen hyperscalers at the top of the stack while lowering entry barriers at the edge. The distribution of complementary assets decides where the surplus settles.

Section 07

The expanding idea space

The knowledge stock A is not one library in which every book sits equally close to every reader. New evidence applies validated language models to more than 11 million U.S. patent claims from 1836 to 2023 and finds that inventions have spread apart in idea space.[5] A 98 percent decline in patent interference rates corroborates the text evidence. The resulting spatial mechanism can explain weaker spillovers, higher patent values and roughly forty percent of the long-run decline in measured research productivity.

11 million patents · conceptual map

The library is becoming a landscape

New patent evidence suggests inventions have spread apart over two centuries. A larger knowledge stock creates opportunities, but distance raises the cost of finding, absorbing, and combining them.

The frontier spreads apart

Search distance can fall. Proof cost does not automatically fall with it.

This reframes the “ideas are getting harder to find” result.[4] The frontier may be expanding as researchers occupy valuable new territory. The cost then moves from finding any idea toward navigating, understanding and combining distant ones. Standing on shoulders becomes distance weighted. A larger A creates more opportunity and a greater burden of absorption at the same time.

AI may be especially valuable as a bridge: semantic search, translation, representation learning and agents can lower the cost of crossing disciplines. But generative abundance can also expand the frontier faster, creating more branches than institutions can test. The relevant statistic is not patent or paper volume. It is successful recombination across distance at constant or improving validation quality.

Section 09

Is growth additive?

The strongest endogenous-growth story assumes that the next increment to productivity is proportional to the existing level. A bigger stock generates bigger absolute gains, preserving a constant percentage rate. A new empirical challenge finds that U.S. TFP increments appear conditionally additive rather than exponential.[6] Professional forecasts and international series are reported as more consistent with constant increments than constant percentages.

This does not refute non-rival ideas. It challenges the shortcut from non-rivality to exponential aggregate growth. Local idea-production systems can scale proportionally while aggregation, sectoral composition, depreciation and diffusion produce an additive macro process. The same observed short-run task gain can therefore support radically different long-run paths.

Level shift

A higher path

The stock jumps; trend growth returns.

Semi-endogenous

A long transition

Growth depends on expanding research effort and persistent tool improvement.

Proportional

A new regime

Validated ideas scale with A and permanently raise percentage growth.

AI could still create an enormous level shift: better medicine, faster engineering, cheaper services and richer organizational knowledge. That future is consequential even if the economy does not enter an explosive path. The discipline is to match the claim to the mechanism. “AI raises output” is not equivalent to “AI raises the growth rate forever,” and neither establishes recursive acceleration.

Acemoglu’s task-based macro estimates provide a conservative counterweight to extrapolation from benchmarks.[14] Research on AI as an innovation in the method of innovation makes the more ambitious case that machine systems can improve the process of invention itself.[13] Both can be internally coherent because they assign different values to coverage, translation, persistence and equilibrium adjustment.

Section 10

The institutions of diffusion

Ideas spill across organizations and borders. New causal estimates of U.S. federal R&D find that a one-percent shock to the federal research-capital stock raises foreign TFP by about one percent after twelve years, with global returns roughly twice domestic returns.[11] The country paying for research captures only part of the gain. That is Romer in the data: a non-rival idea does not stop at customs.

AI can enlarge the spillover by lowering translation, search and adaptation costs. It can also shrink it when export controls, incompatible standards, closed data and geopolitical fragmentation prevent reuse. National cost-benefit analysis will underinvest when it counts domestic rents and ignores foreign productivity. Private firms will underprovide shared validation infrastructure when its value leaks to competitors.

This is why AI infrastructure cannot mean data centers alone. The infrastructure of endogenous growth includes universities, skilled migration, public laboratories, secure data environments, independent benchmarks, standards, intellectual property, venture finance, competition, grids, laboratories, regulatory science and organizations capable of adopting what the research system discovers. Subsidizing one bottleneck can raise the price of another.

Institutions also govern epistemic diversity. AI aggregation can broaden access to knowledge while making researchers rely on correlated summaries, rankings and synthetic outputs.[16] If a few models mediate the scientific record, search cost may fall while monoculture risk rises. Independent replication, open methods, model-version records and plural evaluation become growth institutions because they protect the quality of A.

Section 11

Firm, worker, state

For the research-intensive firm

Map the whole discovery chain before selecting a model. Instrument literature search, hypothesis generation, simulation, experiment, replication, engineering, certification and commercial use. When one stage accelerates, move capital and people to the newly scarce complement. Preserve rejected designs and negative experiments as organizational memory: a failure enters A when it prevents another team from repeating it.

For workers and research leaders

Human capital does not disappear when machines enter research. Its allocation changes. Routine search and drafting may lose value. Framing a decisive question, designing a test, recognizing an anomaly, integrating distant domains and accepting responsibility may gain value. The critical skill becomes epistemic judgment: knowing what must be true before a plausible answer deserves to enter the knowledge stock.

For policymakers

Finance public validation capacity: shared laboratories, testbeds, benchmarks, secure data enclaves, standards, replication and regulatory science. Protect diffusion without eliminating appropriability through research exceptions, interoperability, prizes, procurement and time-limited rights. Preserve contestability so a concentrated model layer does not convert a growth engine into a rent-extraction system.

For investors

Look beyond the lowest inference price. Durable value may accrue to the assets that verify, embody, distribute and govern ideas: instruments, simulation platforms, lab automation, proprietary data networks, cybersecurity, regulatory tooling, grid infrastructure and firms with superior absorptive capacity. Candidate generation can commoditize while the bottleneck earns the rent.

Section 12

Build a Romer–AI observatory

The central dependent variable should be the flow of validated, adopted, reusable knowledge—not raw model output. No single dataset measures it. A credible empirical program must link research inputs, process measures, epistemic outcomes, business outcomes and spillovers. The unit should be a workflow or technology domain before it is an entire economy.

Usable knowledge output
(9)
Kf,t=Qf,t×Uf,t×Df,tK^{*}_{f,t}=Q_{f,t}\times U_{f,t}\times D_{f,t}

Q is epistemic quality, U is embodiment and use, and D is diffusion across projects, firms, countries or derivative inventions.

The Romer–AI observatory

Follow the whole chain

  1. 01

    Inputs

    R&D spend · researchers · compute · data access

  2. 02

    Process

    Cycle time · candidates · experiments · rejection

  3. 03

    Knowledge

    Validation · novelty · replication · reuse

  4. 04

    Business

    Time to market · quality · unit cost · TFP

  5. 05

    Spillovers

    Citations · forks · standards · global diffusion

Do not stop at prompts, tokens, benchmark scores, patent counts, or candidate volume.

The empirical challenge is selection. High-performing labs adopt early. Easier projects attract automation. Tool access is bundled with training and redesign. Improvements in data or management coincide with rollout. Usage logs alone are descriptive; a correlation between tokens and output can simply reveal that productive teams both use more AI and produce more.

The strongest enterprise design randomizes not only access, but the complement package: access alone; access plus training; access plus workflow redesign; access plus expanded validation capacity. It records model version, prompts and tool calls, human review, rejected output and rejection reasons. It follows immediate task metrics and delayed final outcomes at three, six, twelve and twenty-four months.

Patent, science and software data can connect the micro process to diffusion. PatentsView, PATSTAT and semantic patent representations can measure novelty, distance and inventor teams. OpenAlex and linked data/code records can measure scientific reuse and replication. Git repositories can separate commits, reviews and releases. Clinical and materials databases can follow candidates through physical proof. AI-generated covariates require model-version records, validation sets and uncertainty propagation so measurement technology does not manufacture the trend it is supposed to estimate.[22]

  1. Define the final outcome and complete workflow before deployment.
  2. Pre-register cycle time, quality, error, novelty, adoption and spillover measures.
  3. Randomize access and complementary investments where operations permit.
  4. Record machine cost, human effort, rejection, rework and expected error loss.
  5. Follow output to release, experiment, protocol, sale, standard or derivative use.
  6. Repeat after model migration to measure durability and organizational memory.
  7. Publish null results and failure modes so the knowledge stock is not a selected archive.

Section 13

What would prove us wrong?

A serious growth claim must specify the observations that would change our mind. The optimistic Romerian thesis weakens if publication, patent, code or hypothesis volume rises while replication, novelty, product entry, clinical success and TFP do not. It weakens if task time falls but total cycle time remains fixed because verification and rework expand one-for-one.

F1

Cross-domain recombination remains flat despite better semantic search.

F2

Frontier labs improve while smaller firms and public institutions cannot absorb the tools.

F3

Causal gains appear only where management, data and skills changed simultaneously.

F4

Additive TFP dynamics persist after a decade of machine-assisted research.

F5

Correlated errors and synthetic-data feedback reduce epistemic diversity.

F6

Model migration destroys workflows because little organizational knowledge was retained.

The thesis strengthens with sustained declines in validated discovery cost; shorter end-to-end cycles; higher replication and novelty at constant quality; faster diffusion across disciplines and countries; randomized productivity gains; and evidence that improved research tools raise the productivity of developing the next generation of research tools.

This openness to falsification matters because AI forecasts are unusually vulnerable to category errors. A benchmark becomes a task. A task becomes an occupation. An occupation becomes a sector. A sector becomes GDP. A one-time gain becomes a permanent growth rate. Each step can be defensible. None follows automatically from the previous one.

Conclusion

From possibility into knowledge

AI may be the most Romerian technology we have built: a machine for recombining non-rival ideas, a tool for producing new ideas, and potentially an input into improving the process of invention itself. But it is embedded in a Solovian world of rival capital and an institutional world of evidence, permission, trust and consequence.

The growth miracle will not arrive when machines can propose more ideas. It will arrive when economies learn to verify, diffuse and compound the right ones. The winner will not be the country or company that generates the most intelligence. It will be the one that wastes the least between possibility and knowledge.

Growth still arrives one validated idea at a time.

Generate.

plausible candidates

Validate.

reliable knowledge

Diffuse.

compounding capability

Explore the Economics Evolving model

Linked bibliography

References

Research cut-off: 5 August 2026. Status labels distinguish working papers, discussion papers and institutional releases from journal publications.

  1. 1

    Romer, Paul M. (1990).

    Endogenous Technological Change. Journal of Political Economy, 98(5, Part 2), S71–S102.

  2. 2

    Jones, Charles I. (1995).

    R&D-Based Models of Economic Growth. Journal of Political Economy, 103(4), 759–784.

  3. 3

    Jones, Charles I. (2021).

    The Past and Future of Economic Growth: A Semi-Endogenous Perspective. NBER Working Paper 29126.

    Working paperSource
  4. 4

    Bloom, Nicholas; Jones, Charles I.; Van Reenen, John & Webb, Michael (2020).

    Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?. American Economic Review, 110(4), 1104–1144.

  5. 5

    Ganguli, Ina; Lin, Jeffrey; Meursault, Vitaly & Reynolds, Nicholas F. (2026).

    Spreading Out Across Expanding Idea Space. NBER Working Paper 35499.

    Working paperSource
  6. 6

    Jones, Callum J.; López-Salido, David & Philippon, Thomas (2026).

    Is Growth Additive?. NBER Working Paper 35415.

    Working paperSource
  7. 7

    Jones, Benjamin F. (2025/2026).

    Artificial Intelligence in Research and Development. Working paper.

    Working paperSource
  8. 8

    Jones, Charles I. (2026).

    A.I. and Our Economic Future. NBER Working Paper 34779, revised June 2026.

    Working paperSource
  9. 9

    Demirer, Mert; Musolff, Leon & Yang, Liyuan (2026).

    Writing Code vs. Shipping Code: Productivity Effects Across Generations of AI Coding Tools. NBER Working Paper 35275.

    Working paperSource
  10. 10

    Bryan, Kevin A. & Gans, Joshua S. (2026).

    Training AI for When Humans Will Use It. NBER Working Paper 35490.

    Working paperSource
  11. 11

    De Souza, Gustavo; Fieldhouse, Andrew J.; Mertens, Karel; Nath, Ishan B. & Ramey, Valerie A. (2026).

    The Effects of U.S. Public R&D on Global Growth. NBER Working Paper 35517.

    Working paperSource
  12. 12

    Kim, Seula; Olmstead-Rumsey, Jane & Wang, Honghao (2026).

    Ideas and Firm Dynamics When It Takes Two to Tango. CEPR Discussion Paper 21817.

    Discussion paperSource
  13. 13

    Bontadini, Filippo; Corrado, Carol; Haskel, Jonathan & Jona-Lasinio, Cecilia (2026).

    AI as an Innovation in the Method of Innovation: Implications for Productivity Growth. AEA Papers and Proceedings.

  14. 14

    Acemoglu, Daron (2024).

    The Simple Macroeconomics of AI. Economic Policy.

  15. 15

    Agrawal, Ajay; Gans, Joshua; Goldfarb, Avi et al. (2026).

    AI in Science. NBER Working Paper 34953.

    Working paperSource
  16. 16

    Acemoglu, Daron; Lin, Tianyi; Ozdaglar, Asuman & Siderius, James (2026).

    How AI Aggregation Affects Knowledge. NBER Working Paper 35036.

    Working paperSource
  17. 17

    OpenAI (2026).

    LifeSciBench. Official research release.

    Institutional releaseSource
  18. 18

    OpenAI (2026).

    Scientific Computing in the Age of Agentic AI. Official research release.

    Institutional releaseSource
  19. 19

    Anthropic (2026).

    Paving the Way for Agents in Biology. Official research release.

    Institutional releaseSource
  20. 20

    Microsoft Research (2026).

    EvoLib: Reusable Skills from Inference-Time Experience. Research project.

    Research projectSource
  21. 21

    Ash, Elliott; Mehmood, Sultan & Goessmann, Christoph (2026).

    Courts of Tomorrow: Evidence from a Nationwide Rollout of Generative AI. CEPR Discussion Paper 21783.

    Discussion paperSource
  22. 22

    Duan, Junting & Pelger, Markus (2026).

    Inference with AI-Generated Covariates. NBER Working Paper 35481.

    Working paperSource
All essaysIdeas · validation · diffusion