Is Distance from Innovation a Barrier to the Adoption of Artificial Intelligence?

We thank Bledi Taska and Lightcast (formerly known as Burning Glass Technologies) for access to data and Erich Denk formerly of the Technology and Policy Research Initiative at Boston University for extensive data work on the Burning Glass Technologies files. We thank Dany Bahar, Shai Bernstein, Lindsey McGowen, and Gregor Schubert for providing other data. We are grateful for comments from Flavio Calvino, Aureo de Paula, Ina Ganguli, Sabrina Genz, Britta Glennon, Tarek Alexander Hassan, Sabrina Howell, Ben Jones, Bill Kerr, John Landon-Lane, Dennis Novy, Gregor Schubert, Ruonan Xu and participants in the Australian OVERS seminar, the University of Sydney Microeconometrics and Public Policy Working Group seminar, the Technology and Policy Research Initiative seminar, the University of Southern Switzerland economics seminar, the 2021 NBER Artificial Intelligence Conference, the 2023 Artificial Intelligence and the Economy conference and the 2024 Royal Economic Society conference for helpful comments. All three authors are affiliated with the Technology and Policy Research Initiative at Boston University, and Hunt is also affiliated with the University of Sydney, IZA (Bonn), CEPR (Paris) and DIW (Berlin) and thanks the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics for hospitality while working on the paper. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.