Independent research in economics.
Housing · Inequality
Since 2015 Spain has made room for its newcomers by squeezing rather than building, and rents rose where they arrived. Rents are paid by renters, and renters are poor and young: the same inflow costs the poorest tenth about seven times as much of its income as the richest, while the price gain goes to older owners.
Read essayLabor and AI · Wages
The advice for the age of AI is to work with your hands and with people. It is right about jobs and wrong about pay. In care, retail and hospitality, wages will follow who else can do the job, and AI is sending more people their way. Data from the US, the UK, Spain and the EU.
Read essayHousing · Migration
Spain's population has grown twice in two decades. The first time, it built homes for the newcomers. The second time, it fitted them into the homes it already had, and around Barcelona the squeeze began to push residents out. Provincial maps and an international comparison.
Read essayAI Economics · Business Models
AI software is moving from seats to usage, and from usage to tasks and outcomes. This is not a fashion in pricing. It follows from one question: who decides how much compute the product burns? Copilots, agents and the old choice between cost-plus and fixed-price contracts.
Read essayLabor and AI · Human Capital
Juniors have always learned by doing the easy work. AI now does the easy work, and once it is standard, knowledge below its frontier stops being paid. Learning becomes all or nothing, each model release raises the bar, and employers have little reason to pay for the missing rungs.
Read essayAI Economics · Business Models
Solo founders now start a third of new companies, and some write almost no code by hand. But whatever makes your product cheaper to build makes your rival's cheaper too. With free entry, the typical software firm ends up worth what it cost to build, so cheaper building means cheaper firms. What survives is what code cannot copy.
Read essayThe Incidence of Population Shocks in Local Housing Markets
When Software Becomes a Producer: Pricing, Incentives and Scale under Variable Inference Costs
Frontier, Leverage and the Distribution of Productivity Gains
Implementation Capacity and the Economics of AI Adoption
Trade, Firm Premia and the Wage Distribution across Spanish Regions, 2006–2022
and a Shift-Share Instrument for Immigration
How technological change alters firms, markets and economic behavior.
Economic questions created or reshaped by major structural changes.
Project Frontier is an independent personal research project by Jorge Menéndez-Pidal. It explores the economics of technology and other economic problems of today.
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