GG Gita Gopinath On Conversations with Tyler

“What we've seen through past cycles of automation is that something like 85% of automation-related job losses happen in the first year of recessions.”

Conversations with Tyler · Ideas & Essays · September 2026

Context

Asked by Tyler Cowen what she is working on now that her IMF term has ended, Gopinath described a new project on AI and jobs. Her angle is that everyone is tracking layoffs happening right now, when the historical pattern says the losses land in recessions. She is trying to measure the resulting latent pool: workers who are exposed but only get cut once companies go into cost-cutting mode.

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Transcript

Conversations with Tyler Around 54:32 into the episode

Gita Gopinath

…very interesting times to be an academic too. And so, yeah, I mean, you know, I'm working on digital money, stable coins, because of my work on dollar dominance. I'm curious to know how this can affect dollar dominance or not. I mean, that's one big area, but also working on a project on AI. What's

Tyler Cowen

your AI project? The

Gita Gopinath

AI project is, which I've just kickstarted, is actually looking at the impact of AI on jobs. Everybody else is doing that. But there is one difference I think that's not coming up in the conversations, which is people are tracking what the effect is on what's happening to jobs right now with the advent of AI. But what we've seen through past cycles of automation is that something like 85% of automation-related job losses happen in the first year of recessions. So there's a sense in which there's like a latent buildup of the fact that a pool of workers who, when there's a recession and you're in cost-cutting mode, companies lay off and then you have jobless recoveries. We saw that after the great financial crisis. So with my co-authors, I am working on trying to understand to see what we can do right now in terms of tracking what that latent pool could…

Tyler Cowen

Great. Gita Gopinath, thank you very much. Thank you, Tyler. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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