Market pricing implies AI permanently lifts software productivity 32.6%
Market pricing implies AI is worth a permanent 32.6% boost to software engineering productivity, a 3.6% baseline GDP effect, but the method is the authors' own and unreviewed.
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Market pricing implies AI is worth the equivalent of a permanent 32.6% increase in software engineering productivity: from November 2022 to December 2025, stock-price sensitivity to AI was mapped into productivity gains, implying a GDP level effect of 3.6% in the baseline, or 6.5% if AI also raises R&D productivity.
There was previously no market-based measure of AI's macroeconomic effect; such estimates depend on model mappings and are the result of a purpose-built method.
The measurement was made by Alex Blumenfeld, Jonathon Hazell, Chen Lian and Andreas Schaab in an NBER working paper: the method estimates each firm's stock-return sensitivity to an AI index, then maps it into productivity gains weighted by the software share of firm payroll. The authors say that by mid-2026, amid rapid progress in coding agents, the effect had more than doubled relative to the end of 2025.
This is a working paper, not peer-reviewed; the estimate depends on a model mapping and is the authors' own self-reported method, with no independent replication yet.