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Journal Article
The Innovation Puzzle: Patents and Productivity Growth
Understanding the pace and nature of technological progress is key for evaluating innovation policy and projecting economic growth.
AI and Productivity Growth: Evidence from Historical Developments in Other Technologies
An analysis of the diffusion of PCs, smart devices, cloud computing and 3D printing suggests that AI may spread in a pattern similar to those of PCs and cloud computing.
Working Paper
The Diffusion of New Technologies
CORRECT ORDER OF AUTHORS: Aakash Kalyani, Nicholas Bloom, Marcela Carvalho, Tarek Hassan, Josh Lerner, and Ahmed Tahoun. We identify phrases associated with novel technologies using textual analysis of patents, job postings, and earnings calls, enabling us to identify four stylized facts on the diffusion of jobs relating to new technologies. First, the development of economically impactful new technologies is geographically highly concentrated, more so even than overall patenting: 56% of the most economically impactful technologies come from just two U.S. locations, Silicon Valley and the ...
AI and Productivity: What Firms Are Saying on Earnings Calls
The way firms discuss productivity improvements on earnings calls increasingly involves references to AI, even if its effects aren’t clear in aggregate data.
Journal Article
Is Optimism for Artificial Intelligence Boosting Investment?
U.S. business spending related to artificial intelligence (AI) grew substantially in 2025 among publicly traded firms, which account for the bulk of overall investment. Analyzing sentiment data from quarterly company earnings calls can help infer current and evolving optimism towards AI. Public firm data show growth in capital spending and research and development funding has come entirely from the largest companies that are positive about AI. While market concentration among large firms raises some challenges, optimism measures suggest that AI investment will continue to contribute to future ...
Working Paper
New Technologies and the College Premium
This paper shows that the pace of technology creation is a key driver of wage inequality. It develops a model where college-educated workers learn how to use new technologies faster than others, and where this advantage dissipates over time as technologies become standardized and easier to use. In equilibrium, the college wage premium is determined by the interplay between the pace of technology creation and standardization. A heightened pace of technology creation causes a long-lasting increase in the college premium. We calibrate the model using novel text-based data on new technologies and ...
Working Paper
Economic Surveillance using Corporate Text
FULL AND CORRECT ORDER OF AUTHORS: Tarek A. Hassan, Stephan Hollander, Aakash Kalyani, Laurence van Lent, Markus Schwedeler, and Ahmed Tahoun. This article applies simple methods from computational linguistics to analyze unstructured corporate texts for economic surveillance. We apply text-as-data approaches to earnings conference call transcripts, patent texts, and job postings to uncover unique insights into how markets and firms respond to economic shocks, such as a nuclear disaster or a geopolitical event---insights that often elude traditional data sources. This method enhances our ...
AI Hype or Reality? Shifts in Corporate Investment after ChatGPT
An analysis of earnings calls shows a sharp rise in AI-related chatter among U.S. corporate executives. But this increase doesn’t appear to be matched by a similar rise in capital and R&D spending.
Journal Article
Real-Time Discovery of Corporate Risks
We propose a new methodology to discover emerging corporate risks in real time by analyzing the text of quarterly earnings conference calls from 2008 to 2025. Our approach identifies bigrams (two-word phrases) within risk-related sentences whose usage surges significantly and then groups them into thematic topics. The method successfully recovers a timeline of major economic events, from the credit crisis in 2008 to macroeconomic and tariff uncertainty in 2025. We find that firms manage these risks differently. While macroeconomic uncertainty is associated with reductions in investment and ...
Journal Article
Uneven Innovation in the U.S.
The San Jose and San Francisco areas don’t make the U.S. top 10 in terms of population, and they each contain merely 1% of the national workforce. But jointly they produce about 20% of all innovation output.