Anton Korinek
Last reviewed
Jun 8, 2026
Sources
18 citations
Review status
Source-backed
Revision
v1 · 1,944 words
Improve this article
Add missing citations, update stale details, or suggest a clearer explanation.
Suggest edit
CtrlK
Last reviewed
Jun 8, 2026
Sources
18 citations
Review status
Source-backed
Revision
v1 · 1,944 words
Add missing citations, update stale details, or suggest a clearer explanation.
Anton Korinek is an Austrian-American economist who is a professor in the Department of Economics and the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia (UVA), where he founded and directs the Economics of Transformative AI (EconTAI) Initiative. He is one of the first mainstream economists to study in detail what happens to economic growth, wages, and inequality if artificial intelligence systems become capable of performing most or all of the tasks that humans do. His work spans the economics of AI and transformative AI, the use of large language models as research tools for economists, and policy preparation for a possible transition to artificial general intelligence (AGI). In 2025 he was named to the TIME100 AI list of the most influential people in artificial intelligence. [1][2][3][17][18]
Korinek was born in Austria and completed his first degrees in Vienna. He studied law and economics at the University of Vienna, earning a law qualification (Cand. iur.) in 1997 and a master's degree in economics, awarded with distinction, in 2000. His master's thesis, "Asymmetries in the European Monetary Transmission Mechanism," was supervised by Baron Alexandre Lamfalussy, the Belgian-Hungarian economist and central banker often described as a father of the euro. [4][18]
He then moved to the United States for doctoral study at Columbia University, where he completed a PhD in economics, also with distinction, in 2007. His dissertation, "Dollar Borrowing in Emerging Markets," was sponsored by the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, with a committee that also included Patrick Bolton, Donald Davis, Robert Hodrick, and David Weinstein. The partnership with Stiglitz, begun during his graduate years, would continue for nearly two decades and produce much of Korinek's later work on technology and inequality. Before and during his studies he worked in the information technology and financial sectors in Austria, including a period as head of an IT department. [4]
Korinek began his academic career as an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he taught from 2007 to 2013. In 2013 he moved to Johns Hopkins University as an assistant professor of economics, a position he held until 2018. That year he joined the University of Virginia as an associate professor jointly appointed in the Department of Economics and the Darden School of Business, and he was promoted to full professor in 2021. [4]
Much of Korinek's earlier research concerned international finance and macroeconomics, including widely cited work on capital flows, financial crises, and the prudential regulation of cross-border borrowing in emerging markets. He has held visiting and research positions at the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Bank for International Settlements, and several central banks. He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (he was a faculty research fellow from 2012 to 2018 and a research associate thereafter) and a research fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), where since 2024 he has led its research and policy network on AI. [4][5]
As his focus shifted toward artificial intelligence, Korinek took on a series of policy-facing roles. He held the David M. Rubenstein Fellowship at the Brookings Institution from 2021 to 2023 and remained affiliated with Brookings as a nonresident and then visiting fellow through 2025. He is a fellow of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab and a nonresident senior fellow of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. From 2021 to 2024 he served as the economics of AI lead at the Centre for the Governance of AI (GovAI) in Oxford, and he edited the Oxford Handbook of AI Governance over the same period. [4][6][7][10]
| Years | Position | Institution |
|---|---|---|
| 2007 to 2013 | Assistant Professor of Economics | University of Maryland, College Park |
| 2013 to 2018 | Assistant Professor of Economics | Johns Hopkins University |
| 2018 to 2021 | Associate Professor | University of Virginia (Economics and Darden) |
| 2021 to present | Professor | University of Virginia (Economics and Darden) |
| 2021 to 2024 | Economics of AI Lead | Centre for the Governance of AI, Oxford |
| 2025 to present | Faculty Director | Economics of Transformative AI (EconTAI) Initiative, UVA |
Among his other activities, Korinek has been a consultant to the IMF Independent Evaluation Office, a senior researcher at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, and, in 2024, a member of the G7 High-Level Panel of Experts on AI. He has served as an associate editor of the Journal of Monetary Economics since 2020. [4]
Korinek is best known for taking seriously the economic implications of transformative AI, a term for AI advanced enough to drive changes on the scale of the Industrial Revolution, and of artificial general intelligence. Where many economists have modeled AI as an incremental extension of past automation, Korinek asks what standard growth and labor models predict if machines eventually become capable of performing essentially all human tasks, including the cognitive work that has historically been the main source of human wages. [3][9]
His collaboration with Joseph Stiglitz produced some of the earliest formal treatments of this question. In work first circulated in 2017 and developed through the 2019 NBER volume on the economics of artificial intelligence, the two argued that worker-replacing technological progress can raise aggregate output while simultaneously depressing wages and widening inequality, so that whether society as a whole benefits depends heavily on redistribution. They returned to the theme in later papers, including "Steering Technological Progress" (2025), which contends that policy and research priorities can and should be directed toward innovations that complement human labor rather than displace it. [9][10]
In "Scenarios for the Transition to AGI" (2024), written with Donghyun Suh and issued as an NBER working paper, Korinek models human work as a set of tasks of varying complexity that automation takes over gradually. The paper's central result is that the path of wages depends on a race between automation and capital accumulation: if the set of tasks humans can perform is effectively unbounded, wages can keep rising, but if that set is bounded and automation eventually catches up to it, wages can rise for a time and then collapse once full automation is reached. The framework gives a precise economic language for outcomes, including large-scale labor displacement, that had previously been discussed mostly in informal terms. [8][11]
In "Economic Growth under Transformative AI," a 2025 review article written with Philip Trammell for the Annual Review of Economics, Korinek surveys how transformative AI could affect output growth, the labor share, wages, and the returns to capital across a wide range of modeling assumptions. With Ajay Agrawal and Erik Brynjolfsson he has also set out a broader research agenda, "The Economics of Transformative AI: A Research Agenda," intended to organize the field around questions of growth, distribution, market power, and policy. A recurring theme across this body of work is what Korinek describes as preparing for the non-trivial probability of transformative AI: even amid deep uncertainty about whether or when such systems will arrive, he argues, the stakes are large enough that economists and policymakers should analyze the scenarios in advance. [3][9]
Separately from his macroeconomic work, Korinek has become a prominent advocate for economists' use of generative AI in their own research. His 2023 article "Generative AI for Economic Research: Use Cases and Implications for Economists," published in the Journal of Economic Literature, catalogs dozens of concrete ways that large language models such as ChatGPT can assist with ideation, writing, background research, data analysis, coding, and mathematical derivations, rating each use from experimental to highly useful. Because the underlying tools improve so quickly, he maintains the work as a living project, publishing updated guides roughly every six months, including a 2025 installment on AI agents for economic research. [12][13]
Korinek has carried these arguments into public policy. In November 2023 he submitted a statement to the United States Senate's AI Insight Forum on the workforce, urging lawmakers to prepare the social safety net and tax system, including unemployment insurance, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and Social Security, for scenarios in which AI sharply reduces the demand for human labor. In 2024 he served on the G7 High-Level Panel of Experts on AI, and in 2025 Anthropic named him a founding member of its Economic Advisory Council, a group of economists, also including Tyler Cowen and John List, convened to advise the company on AI's effects on labor markets, growth, and the broader economy. [14][15][16]
In 2025 Korinek launched and became faculty director of the Economics of Transformative AI (EconTAI) Initiative at the University of Virginia, which the university describes as a dedicated research center studying how economies can prepare for AI systems that may match or exceed human capabilities. Co-led with the UVA economists Basil Halperin and Lee Lockwood and supported in part by a grant from the Future of Life Institute, the initiative combines academic research with policy translation and public education, and it has organized workshops on the economics of AI in cooperation with the NBER. [2][3][4]
In 2025 TIME named Korinek to its TIME100 AI list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence, citing his standing as one of the first economists to study seriously the prospect that AI might automate most human labor. The previous year, Vox included him in its 2024 Future Perfect 50 list of people working to improve the future. He also received the Future of Life Institute's grant for the economics of transformative AI in 2025 and, earlier in his career, the American Economic Review's Excellence in Refereeing Award. [3][4][17]
As of 2026 Korinek remains a professor at the University of Virginia and faculty director of the EconTAI Initiative, where he continues to publish on growth, inequality, and economic policy under transformative AI. [1][4]