Automation and Rent Dissipation: Implications for Wages, Inequality, and Productivity
Daron Acemoğlu, Pascual Restrepo · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · 30 Jan 2026
Where this sits in the debate
- Will AI actually boost productivity and growth? · its finding: it depends (why studies differ)
- Will AI destroy more jobs than it creates?
- Will AI widen inequality? · its finding supports the claim (why studies differ)
Direction of the finding as read from the abstract by an AI model (AI-written).
Abstract
Abstract This article studies the effects of automation in a task-based economy in which some jobs pay workers rents—wages above workers' outside options. We show that automation targets high-rent tasks, dissipating rents, amplifying wage losses, and reducing within-group wage dispersion in exposed groups. This form of rent dissipation is inefficient and offsets the productivity gains from automation. Using U.S. data from 1980 to 2016, we find evidence of sizable rent dissipation and reduced within-group wage dispersion due to automation. Automation accounts for 52% of the increase in between-group inequality since 1980, with rent dissipation explaining one-fifth of this total. Our estimates imply that inefficient rent dissipation has offset 60%–90% of the productivity gains from automation over this period.
About this publication
Top journal. One of the journals economics departments rank highest: the “top five” economics journals, and the general-science journals Science and Nature.
Placed by: Top five economics journals. How sources are ranked.
- Published
- 2026 (9 months ago)
- Citations
- 15 (OpenAlex)
Citations in context
15 citations — 98th percentile among the 188 indexed papers from 2026 in this collection. Citation counts favor older papers; this compares only same-year papers here, not the whole literature.
Daron Acemoglu, Pascual Restrepo signed the wemustactnow.ai letter · author affiliation matches seed institutions massachusetts institute of technology, yale university — part of why this paper is in the collection.
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