This Stanford Digital Economy Lab paper by Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen uses payroll data to examine employment effects of generative AI. It reports that workers aged 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed occupations saw relative employment declines, 16% in the November 2025 version (the August 2025 draft reported 13%), while employment for experienced workers in the same jobs remained stable.
The authors find adjustment occurs primarily through employment rather than pay, concentrated in occupations where AI automates rather than augments labor, and results hold when excluding technology firms and remote-friendly occupations. They describe the findings as early, descriptive indicators rather than causal estimates.