Is generative AI replacing research assistants in economics? I cannot observe the assistants, so I measure the printed record. Language models under my direction read the acknowledgments of all 11,718 NBER working papers issued from 2018 through October 2026 and recorded whether each thanks a human for research assistance and whether it says the authors used AI. A credit reflects norms about whom to thank as well as whom the authors hired. The share of papers thanking a research assistant fell from 40 percent before ChatGPT to 37 percent after, and by two to two and a half points (p = 0.08 to 0.04, depending on the series) against 2018 and 2019 alone. Authors who published at NBER in both periods thank assistants three to five points less often than before. Four large programs, Asset Pricing, Monetary Economics, Economic Fluctuations and Growth, and Public Economics, fell by statistically significant amounts on their own, and Asset Pricing’s decline survives a simultaneous test of all 20 programs. The decline is entirely in whether a paper credits anyone. Papers that credit an assistant name as many as before, and the assistants still credited do not appear on more papers each. Statements that the authors used AI rose from none to about one paper in twenty, but outside NBER’s methods series the decline in credits is not where the disclosed AI use is. The sharpest change is in NBER’s Technical Working Papers, its econometrics and methods series, where in 2026, 2 of 28 thanked a research assistant and 8 said the authors used AI, mostly for drafting and coding. I found that cell after inspecting every program, and it is small. Because papers appear after the research is done, and because users take years to learn what a new tool can do, these data may not yet show the effects of the newest tools.
Scott Wallsten is President and Senior Fellow at the Technology Policy Institute, a Policy Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), and a senior fellow at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy. He is an economist with expertise in industrial organization and public policy, and his research focuses on competition, regulation, telecommunications, the economics of digitization, and technology policy. He was the economics director for the FCC's National Broadband Plan and has been a lecturer in Stanford University's public policy program, director of communications policy studies and senior fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation, a senior fellow at the AEI–Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, an economist at the World Bank, and a staff economist at the U.S. President's Council of Economic Advisers. He holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University.
