SSRN

SSRN (Social Science Research Network) is an open-access preprint repository for academic research in social sciences, economics, law, and management. It is owned by Elsevier and hosts working papers before or alongside peer review, making it the primary distribution channel for time-sensitive empirical research in economics. On this beat, SSRN's significance is as the source of the Hosseini Maasoum and Lichtinger working paper analysing 62 million US worker resumes across 285,000 firms, which found entry-level job postings fell 15% in firms adopting AI tools while senior roles remained flat — confirming that the dominant AI displacement channel is slower hiring, not increased firing.

That SSRN finding from Update #4 is directly corroborated by the Stanford Digital Economy Lab's April 2026 JOLTS analysis, which derived a similar pattern (entry-level and young worker suppression) from a different dataset. SSRN working papers are not peer-reviewed, which is relevant when legislators cite individual studies as the basis for policy: the 62-million-resume study is the most comprehensive resume-level analysis available but has not yet completed formal review.

SSRN hosts thousands of AI-and-labour economics papers, most of which reach policymakers and journalists before peer review. The platform's role in this beat reflects a structural feature of the AI jobs debate: official federal data is delayed, conflicting, and in some cases skipped entirely, leaving academic preprints — distributed through SSRN — as the fastest source of labour-market measurement.