{"id":22611,"date":"2026-03-31T08:08:28","date_gmt":"2026-03-31T11:08:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/economicas.uba.ar\/iiep\/?post_type=tribe_events&#038;p=22611"},"modified":"2026-04-06T11:59:19","modified_gmt":"2026-04-06T14:59:19","slug":"does-generative-ai-narrow-education-based-productivity-gaps-evidence-from-a-randomized-experiment","status":"publish","type":"tribe_events","link":"https:\/\/economicas.uba.ar\/iiep\/eventos\/does-generative-ai-narrow-education-based-productivity-gaps-evidence-from-a-randomized-experiment\/","title":{"rendered":"Seminario de Investigaci\u00f3n | Does generative AI narrow education-based productivity gaps? Evidence from a randomized experiment"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\nExpositor | <strong>Guillermo Cruces | <\/strong>UDESA<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><strong>Abstract<\/strong><\/div>\n<div>Does generative artificial intelligence (AI) reinforce or reduce productivity differences across workers? Existing evidence largely studies AI within firms and occupations, where organizational selection compresses educational heterogeneity, leaving unclear whether AI narrows productivity gaps across individuals with substantially different levels of formal education. We address this question using a randomized online experiment conducted outside firms, in which 1,174 adults ages 25\u201345 with heterogeneous educational backgrounds complete an incentivized, workplace-style business problem-solving task. The task is a general (not domain specific) exercise, and participants perform it either with or without access to a generative-AI assistant. Unlike prior work that studies heterogeneity within relatively homogeneous worker samples, our design targets the between\u2013education-group productivity gap as the primary estimand. We find that AI increases productivity for all participants, with substantially larger gains for lower-education individuals. In the absence of AI access, higher-education participants outperform lower-education participants by 0.548 standard deviations; with AI access, this gap falls to 0.139 standard deviations, implying that generative AI closes about three quarters of the initial productivity gap. We interpret this pattern as evidence that generative AI narrows effective productivity differences in task execution by relaxing cognitive constraints that are more binding for lower-education individuals, even though underlying skill differences remain, as reflected in persistent education gaps in task performance and in a follow-up exercise without AI assistance.<\/div>\n<div>\n<p>Co autores\u00a0 Diego Fernandez Me\u0133ide, Sebastian Galiani, Ramiro H. Galvez, Maria Lombardi<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Lugar | FCE-UBA | Aula Olivera<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Expositor | Guillermo Cruces | UDESA Abstract Does generative artificial intelligence (AI) reinforce or reduce productivity differences across workers? Existing evidence largely studies AI within firms and occupations, where organizational<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_tribe_events_status":"","_tribe_events_status_reason":"","footnotes":""},"tags":[],"tribe_events_cat":[224,74],"class_list":["post-22611","tribe_events","type-tribe_events","status-publish","hentry","tribe_events_cat-destacada","tribe_events_cat-seminario-iiep","cat_destacada","cat_seminario-iiep"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Seminario de Investigaci\u00f3n | Does generative AI narrow education-based productivity gaps? Evidence from a randomized experiment - IIEP UBA-CONICET<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/economicas.uba.ar\/iiep\/eventos\/does-generative-ai-narrow-education-based-productivity-gaps-evidence-from-a-randomized-experiment\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"es_ES\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Seminario de Investigaci\u00f3n | Does generative AI narrow education-based productivity gaps? Evidence from a randomized experiment - IIEP UBA-CONICET\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Expositor | Guillermo Cruces | UDESA Abstract Does generative artificial intelligence (AI) reinforce or reduce productivity differences across workers? 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