The Macroeconomic Effect of AI: Sizing the Software Engineering Channel (NBER)
Researchers at the NBER developed a real-time measure to assess how artificial intelligence impacts the economy through software engineering productivity. Their analysis indicates that AI increased the market's expected present value of software engineering productivity by the equivalent of a permanent 32.6% gain between November 2022 and December 2025. This productivity boost corresponds to a 3.6% increase in GDP in the baseline scenario, rising to 6.5% when accounting for higher R&D productivity.
- ▪The study uses financial market data to create a forward-looking measure of AI's impact on software engineering productivity.
- ▪From November 2022 to December 2025, AI contributed to a permanent 32.6% increase in the expected present value of software engineering productivity.
- ▪The baseline effect of this productivity gain on GDP is estimated at 3.6%, while the effect reaches 6.5% if it also raises R&D productivity.
- ▪By mid-2026, the impact of AI on productivity and GDP had more than doubled compared to the end of 2025 due to rapid progress in coding agents.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 6,784 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | NBER |
| Canonical URL | https://www.nber.org/papers/w35793 |
| Publication time | Tue, 29 Sep 2026 05:07:43 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-29T05:19:54.570Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-29T05:19:54.570Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | vYVHAhYN7MWF · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Home Research Working Papers The Macroeconomic Effect of AI: Sizing… The Macroeconomic Effect of AI: Sizing the Software Engineering Channel Alex Blumenfeld, Jonathon Hazell, Chen Lian & Andreas Schaab Share X LinkedIn Facebook Bluesky Threads Email Link Working Paper 35793 DOI 10.3386/w35793 Issue Date September 2026 We measure how artificial intelligence (AI) affects the economy through its impact on software engineering productivity. We use information from financial markets to develop a forward-looking measure that is available in real time. We estimate the sensitivity of each firm’s stock return to an AI stock market index, and how this sensitivity depends on the share of firm payroll in software engineering.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at NBER.