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TopicsEconomics Returns to Research and Development Software Industry Economic growth

Returns to research are higher in software than in the aggregate U.S. economy.

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Our work suggests that the returns to research in software are high – in some cases, our estimates are consistent with a proportional increase in research input resulting in a greater-than-proportional software improvement. In contrast, the returns to R&D in other domains might be substantially lower.

Do the returns to software R&D point towards a singularity?blog postextraction 0.75

Tamay Besiroglu, Ege Erdil, Anson Ho · Epoch AI · original

Comparison with Bloom et al. (2020) estimate of r ≈ 0.32 for the aggregate US economy, replicated as r ≈ 0.25.

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Created by extractor · Nov 11, 2026. Every judgment on this page is accompanied by a reasoning trace.