Last week OpenAI posted an opening for an Economist in a team called Economic Research. The job description says the role would study how AI is affecting jobs, wages, skill demand, and productivity. Those are the questions at the heart of public anxiety about AI's impact on work, and the questions policymakers have been trying to answer.
The role would use OpenAI's own usage data alongside government statistics. The posting frames the purpose directly:
You will work at the intersection of economic research, data science, and public policy to produce rigorous empirical work that informs decision-makers across the public, industry, and government.
Private-sector economists have traditionally worked on pricing, forecasting, market design, or ad system economics. Companies that needed to understand their impact on jobs or productivity historically contracted the research out or read what public researchers published. OpenAI has decided this question is important enough to bring in-house.
The posting lists three research areas of interest:
Economic Measurement of AI Impact (e.g., adoption trajectories, labor market transitions, productivity growth, and forecasting/scenario modeling for AI-driven economic change)
Macroeconomic Implications of AI (e.g., productivity, technology diffusion, economic growth)
AI and the Labor Market (e.g., employment, wages, job search, task-level impacts, skill acquisition)
These research areas cover the same territory as several debates already active in public conversation: whether AI-driven productivity gains could make shorter workweeks feasible, whether displacement translates into structural unemployment or reallocation across industries, whether entry-level roles are the first to go. The posting does not name those as research targets. But the methods it lists, like adoption trajectories, labor market transitions, task-level impacts, are exactly what those questions require to get answered rigorously.
OpenAI wants a Ph.D. in economics with up to five years of post-Ph.D. experience, a research background in labor markets or related applied economics, and cross-functional research skills. Five years post-Ph.D. is still pre-tenure at most research universities, and many economists at that stage are weighing whether their long-term path is in industry, academia, or public policy. OpenAI is bidding for them in exactly that window, before they commit to a tenured academic path.
OpenAI is not alone. Anthropic has posted a nearly identical role, a Research Economist in Economic Research, San Francisco. The Anthropic listing describes the work as developing new methodological approaches for studying AI's impact on:
Labor markets and the future of work
Productivity and task transformation
Economic inequality and displacement
Industry-specific disruption and adaptation
Aggregate economic trajectories (GDP, productivity, unemployment) under varying AI-adoption scenarios
Two of the largest AI labs are investing in understanding the same set of questions.
AI labs are willing to pay more than any other employer for this expertise. Assistant professor salaries in economics at top research universities land roughly in the $150,000 to $180,000 range with summer support, per the AAUP 2024-25 Faculty Compensation Survey. A PhD economist at the Federal Reserve or the Bureau of Labor Statistics is typically hired at the GS-11 to GS-13 level, which comes to somewhere between $95,000 and $130,000 including locality pay. By contrast, OpenAI's ceiling is $385,000 in cash, roughly 2-3x what any academic or public-sector role has ever offered.
The public has been asking questions about AI's impact on work. The largest AI labs are staffing to answer them from the inside.
Works Cited
OpenAI. "Economist." Ashby Jobs Board (OpenAI Careers), 2026. https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/9ac67097-139b-4e3c-8c13-e9a6be26cf1b
AAUP. "Preliminary 2024-25 Faculty Compensation Survey Results." American Association of University Professors, 2025. https://www.aaup.org/preliminary-2024-25-faculty-compensation-survey-results
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. "Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) — Careers at Bureau of Labor Statistics." https://www.bls.gov/jobs/faq.htm