A central question in economics is whether technological innovations complement or substitute workers’ skills, thus enhancing or replacing workers’ productivity. However, occupational output is often hard to measure, especially for high-skilled workers performing abstract tasks, making it hard to answer this question. In this paper, we focus on the effect of technology on productivity and inequality within a specific high-skilled group, that of researchers in economics, for whom we measure research output. Specifically, we study the effect of the introduction of DYNARE, a software designed to solve and simulate dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. We first develop a dynamic model of research and citation accumulation, in which the arrival of the technology allows some researchers to perform more easily a subset of the tasks needed to write aca- demic papers. Next, we test the model’s implications by leveraging quasi-experimental variation in DYNARE adoption across fields. We implement a difference-in-differences strategy, finding a significant increase in the average number of publications. Consistent with the predictions of the model, the increase in publication is driven by less productive scholars, thus suggesting that the new technology could have led to a decrease in citation inequality.
