Pascual Restrepo

Pascual Restrepo Mesa, competing for Colombia at the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), won bronze in 2003 (13 points) and silver in 2004 and 2005 (31 points each).⁠[1]

His CV lists IMO silver and bronze medals. He studied economics and mathematics at Universidad de los Andes from 2005 to 2010 and pursued a PhD in economics at MIT from 2011 to 2016.⁠[2]

He was a Cowles Foundation Fellow at Yale in 2016–2017 and taught at Boston University from 2017 to 2023.⁠[2]

His empirical work examined industrial robots in US labor markets, how the decline of routine jobs interacted with the Great Recession, and how aging and labor shortages lead firms to automate.⁠[3]

With Daron Acemoglu he released “Robots and Jobs: Evidence from US Labor Markets” as an NBER working paper, later published in the Journal of Political Economy. It estimates that one more industrial robot per thousand workers reduces the employment-to-population ratio by about 0.18–0.34 percentage points.⁠[4]

With Acemoglu he published the paper in the American Economic Review. It models the automation of existing tasks alongside the creation of new tasks in which labor has a comparative advantage, and states that “automation reduces employment and the labor share.”⁠[5]

With Acemoglu he released the NBER working paper “Tasks, Automation, and the Rise in US Wage Inequality,” which estimates that 50% to 70% of changes in the US wage structure over four decades are accounted for by relative wage declines among worker groups specialized in routine tasks in rapidly automating industries.⁠[6]

In 2023 he joined the Yale Department of Economics as an associate professor.⁠[7]

His research covers technology, inequality, labor markets and growth.⁠[8]

In October 2025 he released the solo NBER working paper “We Won’t Be Missed: Work and Growth in the AGI World,” on work and growth in a world with artificial general intelligence (AGI).⁠[9]

In September 2026 it appeared as chapter 9 of The Economics of Transformative AI (University of Chicago Press). It argues that under AGI growth is driven by compute, wages converge to the compute cost of replicating human work, and “the share of labor income in GDP converges to zero.”⁠[10]

With Nils Lehr he published the paper in the Journal of Monetary Economics (2026, vol. 157), asking “How should socially-minded firms price and deploy AI?”⁠[11]

With Tarek Alexander Hassan and Aakash Kalyani he released the NBER working paper “The Skill Premium in Times of Rapid Technological Change,” arguing that “the pace of technology creation is a key driver of the skill premium.”⁠[12]

On predictions that AI will wipe out jobs, he said, “A lot of these claims are premature,” and argued that limited computing power will slow automation.⁠[7]

With Acemoglu he published “Automation and Rent Dissipation: Implications for Wages, Inequality, and Productivity” in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.⁠[8]

He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in the Economic Fluctuations and Growth, Labor Studies, and Productivity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship programs.⁠[13]

He is also affiliated with Yale’s Economic Growth Center.⁠[11]

He is a member of the Cowles Foundation research staff.⁠[14]

His other papers include “Democracy Does Cause Growth” in the Journal of Political Economy, with Acemoglu, Suresh Naidu and James Robinson; “Demographics and Automation” in the Review of Economic Studies; “Uneven Growth” in Econometrica in 2022; “AI and Jobs: Evidence from Online Vacancies”; and the review “Automation: Theory, Evidence, and Outlook.” Earlier he worked with Daniel Mejia on crime and the war on drugs.⁠[15]