Description:

Speaker: Pedro Aldighieri 

Title: General Purpose Technologies and the Evolution of Science: Evidence from the Early Computers (Co-authored with Franco Malpassi) 

Abstract: This paper examines how access to transformative technologies shapes scientific research outcomes. We focus on the introduction of digital computers to U.S. universities during the 1950s and 1960s, leveraging their staggered adoption across institutions to study impacts on research and researcher behavior. Using a novel, comprehensive database of historical computer installations at U.S. universities, combined with publication records, we implement a differences-in-differences design to analyze how early exposure to computers influenced scientific output. Our preliminary findings indicate that research using computers began immediately following institutional installations, with computer-intensive papers concentrated in physical sciences, particularly physics, mathematics, and engineering. While papers using computers show a citation premium of approximately 20%, we find no preliminary evidence that computer installations affected overall researcher productivity.