Avi Goldfarb

The Economics of Bicycles for the Mind. Working paper with @joshgans.bsky.social and Ajay Agrawal. A bicycle amplifies human locomotion. Computers & AI amplify human intelligence. We model cognitive tools, showing when they affect productivity, inequality, & teams. www.nber.org/papers/w34034

We find (1) personally receiving a false positive leads to a persistent decline in screening, (2) exposure to false positives through a co-worker decreases screening, (3) these effects are mitigated in workplaces that had recently experienced true positives. (2/2)

What happens when good products fail? Dinara Akchurina and I have a new paper looking at false positives in COVID rapid tests. Details here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers..... (1/2)

AI Can Strengthen Canada's Economy — If We Let It - Canadian Chamber of Commerce Avi Goldfarb joins host Marwa Abdou to explain why Canada’s early leadership in research hasn’t led to widespread adoption.

AI Can Strengthen Canada’s Economy — If We Let It - @avigoldfarb.bsky.social joined the Canada’s Economy, Explained podcast from the Canadian Chamber of Commerce chamber.ca/ai-can-stren...

Cover of "Industrial Market Structure and Economic Performance"

Mike Scherer, a leader in industrial organization economics, in the study of innovation, and in many other topics since the 1960s, has died at 92. Strikingly eclectic, he wrote (inter alia) about weapons procurement and the commercialization of classical music. More than anything /1

Our work now published showing how better AI can improve both accuracy and diversity in hiring relative to supervised learning tools and status-quo human hiring.

Thanks to the @sloanfoundation.bsky.social for support!

@nber.org

Maria Petrova Gregor Schubert Bledi Taska Pinar Yildirim, Italo Colantone, Jordan Mansell Alex Beyer Ori Freiman John McAndrews & Clifton van der Linden, @dacemoglumit.bsky.social Asuman Ozdaglar James Siderius, and Joshua Tucker. Coeditors Catherine Tucker, Ajay Agrawal, and @joshgans.bsky.social

Entries by
Martin Beraja
& Noam Yuchtman, Chiara Farronato, Steven Callandar, Talia Gillis Scott Nelson & Jann Spiess,
@joshgans, @jasonfurman.bsky.social, Paul Scharre, Dan Gross, Jon Lindsay, Vasiliki Fouka & Bryony Reich,

The Economics of Artificial Intelligence: Political Economy Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

Forthcoming NBER Economics of AI & Political Economy volume. Draft chapters here: www.nber.org/books-and-ch...

YouTube video by CEPR & VideoVox Economics CEPR Webinar Series on the Economics of Artificial Intelligence - 1

'Ajay Agrawal (University of Toronto), Erik Brynjolfsson (Stanford University) and Anton Korinek (University of Virginia and CEPR) jointly present "The Economics of Transformative AI: A Research Agenda".'

@cepr.org @akorinek.bsky.social
#ai #EconSky

The Collapse of Ego Depletion Science's Biggest Self-Control Failure

Roy Baumeister called ego depletion "one of the most replicable findings in social psychology." As someone who spent 20 years studying it—and ultimately had to admit it wasn't real—I have to respectfully disagree. Here's my perspective of what went so wrong.

NBER Innovation Boot Camp is back this summer for a 4th run (thanks open_phil!)! Lectures by Heidi Williams, Pierre Azoulay, Ina Ganguli, Ben Jones, Chad Jones, Kyle Myers, and me, a great policy panel and keynotes, plus attendance at Summer Institute innovation session. www.nber.org/calls-papers...

⏰ Deadline approaching ⏰ -- send us your best work on Behavioral IO and Marketing by 12/15 #econsky

Ah. Good idea. The classic paper.

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Thanks Avner!

#econsky Economists: If you ever wondered what is “quantitative marketing” about, @avigoldfarb.bsky.social’s syllabus is a great place to fill in the gap.
If you never wondered about it - you can learn about it nonetheless.

My PhD syllabus for Introduction to Quantitative Marketing @rotmanschool. Updated for 2025. Comments welcome.

Feel free to suggest additional papers. Self promotion encouraged! All University of Toronto PhD students welcome to audit. Please get in touch.

Super excited to publicly launch "All Day TA" (http://www.alldayta.com), a product @joshgans.bsky.social and I have been working on with our team over the last year. Short version: if you teach in spring, you will want to use this! It's the future of higher education. A short thread: 1/x

Absolutely Interdisciplinary 2024 fosters innovation and collaboration — Schwartz Reisman Institute At SRI’s annual academic conference, leading researchers from diverse fields came together to tackle the complexities of AI alignment and how to better understand the social impacts of data-driven tec...

🌟 12 Days of SRI! 🌟

Data-driven, AI-aligned. In May, leading experts from diverse fields gathered at SRI’s annual conference to discuss the future of AI research.

🔥Catch up on the key takeaways: uoft.me/sri-absint24

The Economics Department at the University of Pittsburgh is hiring! We have an Open Rank position. You can find details and application instructions here: www.aeaweb.org/joe/listing....

Digital Economics and AI Meeting, Spring 2025

NBER Digital Economics and AI meeting at Stanford. Deadline December 16. www.nber.org/conferences/...

Will there be an AI Era? Reflections on Taylor Swift

Will there be an AI Era? Reflections on going to see Taylor Swift. open.substack.com/pub/joshuaga...

If you submit your papers to me at QME, I will tell you to ignore the part of the referee report that complains about results not being surprising.

Academic intergrity is an important and difficult topic to cover well. But I think the gossipy speculative one-dimensional tone of this article is not constructive, does a poor job of conveying what is actually going on & undermines the important topic being covered. A long thread w/ some examples:

Generative AI Is Still Just a Prediction Machine To understand the strategic implications of AI’s new capabilities, managers need a framework for when AI will be helpful and when it might fail. Under the hood, generative AI tools are still predictio...

Latest in HBR on generative AI. hbr.org/2024/11/gene...

Open Calls for Papers, Proposals, and Applications

In general, people who are not members of NBER can submit papers to be considered at NBER conferences. Here's the link to the current calls for papers: www.nber.org/calls-papers...