Mert Demirer | Associate Professor of Economics, MIT Sloan

I am an Associate Professor at the MIT Sloan Applied Economics Group and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Prior to joining MIT Sloan, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research. I received my PhD in economics from MIT in 2020.

I work in the field of empirical industrial organization. My research focuses on firm productivity, artificial intelligence, and antitrust. You can find my CV here.

Working Papers

Writing Code vs. Shipping Code: Productivity Effects Across Generations of AI Coding Tools

with Leon Musolff and Liyuan Yang·2026
Welfare Effects of Buyer and Seller Power

with Michael Rubens·2026
Chaining Tasks, Redefining Work: A Theory of AI Automation

with John J. Horton, Nicole Immorlica, Brendan Lucier and Peyman Shahidi·2026
Firm Productivity and Learning with Digital Technologies: Evidence from Cloud Computing

with James Brand, Connor Finucane and Avner Kreps·2025

Published and Accepted Papers

Data, Privacy Laws and Firm Production: Evidence from the GDPR

with Diego Jiménez Hernández, Dean Li and Sida Peng

Conditionally accepted, Journal of Political Economy, 2026
The Emerging Market for Intelligence: How Firms Buy and Sell AI

with Andrey Fradkin and Nadav Tadelis

Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2026
Production Function Estimation with Factor-Augmenting Technology: An Application to Markups

Econometrica, 2026 (forthcoming)
Do Mergers and Acquisitions Improve Efficiency: Evidence from Power Plants

with Omer Karaduman

Journal of Political Economy, 2026
The Effects of Generative AI on High-Skilled Work: Evidence from Three Field Experiments with Software Developers

with Kevin Cui, Sonia Jaffe, Leon Musolff, Sida Peng and Tobias Salz

Management Science, 2026
Fisher–Schultz Lecture: Generic Machine Learning Inference on Heterogeneous Treatment Effects in Randomized Experiments, With an Application to Immunization in India

with Victor Chernozhukov, Esther Duflo and Iván Fernández-Val

Econometrica, 2025
The Intended and Unintended Consequences of Privacy Regulation for Consumer Marketing

with Jean-Pierre Dubé, John G. Lynch, Dirk Bergemann, Avi Goldfarb, Garrett Johnson, Anja Lambrecht, Tesary Lin, Anna Tuchman and Catherine Tucker

Marketing Science, 2025
Drug Rebates and Formulary Design: Evidence from Statins on Medicare Part D

with Alex Olssen

Conditionally accepted, Journal of Political Economy: Microeconomics, 2024
Semi-Parametric Efficient Policy Learning with Continuous Actions

with Vasilis Syrgkanis, Greg Lewis and Victor Chernozhukov

NeurIPS, 2019
Double/Debiased Machine Learning for Treatment and Structural Parameters

with Victor Chernozhukov, Denis Chetverikov, Esther Duflo, Christian Hansen, Whitney Newey and James Robins

The Econometrics Journal, 2018
Estimating Global Bank Network Connectedness

with Francis X. Diebold, Laura Liu and Kamil Yilmaz

Journal of Applied Econometrics, 2018
Double/Debiased/Neyman Machine Learning of Treatment Effects

with Victor Chernozhukov, Denis Chetverikov, Esther Duflo, Christian Hansen and Whitney Newey

American Economic Review: Papers & Proceedings, 2017

Work in Progress

How On-Demand Inputs Change Firm Production and Business Dynamism: The Case of Cloud Computing

with James Brand and Rebekah Dix
Datacenter Entry and Congestion in the US Electricity Markets

with El Hadi Caoui, Andrew Steck and Sophie Calder-Wang
Federated Learning and Privacy Protection

with Dirk Bergemann, Alessandro Bonatti and Vod Vilfort

Other Writing/Short Papers

Comment on “Mind the Gap: AI Adoption in Europe and the US”

Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2026 (forthcoming)
Writing Code Versus Shipping Code: Productivity Effects Across Generations of AI Coding Tools

with Leon Musolff and Liyuan Yang

VoxEU, 2026
Reply to: Comments on “Fisher–Schultz Lecture: Generic Machine Learning Inference on Heterogeneous Treatment Effects in Randomized Experiments, With an Application to Immunization in India”

with Victor Chernozhukov, Esther Duflo and Iván Fernández-Val

Econometrica, 2025
The Emerging Market for Intelligence: Pricing, Supply, and Demand for LLMs

with Andrey Fradkin, Nadav Tadelis and Sida Peng·2025
How AI-Powered Software Development May Affect Labor Markets

with Peter Cihon

Brookings series on The Economics and Regulation of Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies, 2023
The Impact of AI on Developer Productivity: Evidence from GitHub Copilot

with Sida Peng, Eirini Kalliamvakou and Peter Cihon·2023

Dormant Projects

Production Function Estimation with Imperfect Proxies

2019
Financial Sector Volatility Connectedness and Equity Returns

with Umut Gökçen and Kamil Yilmaz·2016