The Ideation Bottleneck: Decomposing the Quality Gap Between AI-Generated and Human Economics Research

Research reveals AI-generated economics papers significantly underperform human-authored publications, with idea quality representing the primary bottleneck (71% of the gap) rather than execution quality. Analysis of 953 papers shows human research achieves 47.1% exceptional probability versus 16.5% for AI, with only 0.8% of AI papers surpassing median human quality on both dimensions.