The Ideation Bottleneck: Decomposing the Quality Gap Between AI-Generated and Human Economics Research

arXiv:2604.03338v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous AI systems can now generate complete economics research papers, but they substantially underperform human-authored publications in head-to-head comparisons. This paper decomposes the quality gap into two independent components: research idea quality and execution quality. Using a two-model ensemble of fine-tuned language models trained on publication decisions (Gong, Li, and Zhou, 2026) to evaluate idea quality and a comprehensive six-