This paper uses a large language model to develop an ex-ante measure of the commercial potential of scientific findings. In addition to validating the measure against the typical holdout sample, we validate it externally against 1.) the progression of scientific findings through a major...

We study migration in the right tail of the talent distribution using a novel dataset of Indian high school students taking the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE), a college entrance exam used for admission to the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). We find a high incidence of migration...

This study examines the impact of access to confidential administrative data on the rate, direction, and policy relevance of economics research. To study this question, we exploit the progressive geographic expansion of the U.S. Census Bureau's Federal Statistical Research Data Centers (FSRDCs)....

How should the government respond to automation? We study this question in a heterogeneous agent model that takes worker displacement seriously. We recognize that displaced workers face two frictions in practice: reallocation is slow and borrowing is limited. We first show that these frictions...

Concern exists that public funding of science is increasingly risk averse. Funders have addressed this concern by soliciting the submission of high-risk research to either regular or specially designed programs. Little evidence, however, has been gathered to examine the extent to which such...

What are a country's policy options in the face of emerging technologies development in a global economy? To answer this question, we examine optimal dynamic policies in an open economy where technology is endogenously accumulated through R&D innovation. Our key insight is that a country has...

Drawing insights from the field of innovation economics, we discuss the likely competitive environment shaping generative AI advances. Central to our analysis are the concepts of appropriability--whether firms in the industry are able to control the knowledge generated by their innovations--and...

We analyze how output and wages behave under different scenarios for technological progress that may culminate in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), defined as the ability of AI systems to perform all tasks that humans can perform. We assume that human work can be decomposed into atomistic...

We construct a grid that covers the key business functions of an establishment and the main technologies used in each of them. We populate this grid with data from over 20,000 establishments in 15 countries. We use this dataset to document novel "facts" about how establishments use technology,...

We study the impact of techies--engineers and other technically trained workers--on firm-level productivity. We first report new facts on the role of techies in the firm by using French administrative data and unique surveys. Techies are STEM-skill intensive and are associated with innovation,...