Impact of the Availability of ChatGPT on Software Development: A Synthetic Difference in Differences Estimation using GitHub Data

Alexander Quispe and Rodrigo Grijalba

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Advancements in Artificial Intelligence, particularly with ChatGPT, have significantly impacted software development. Utilizing novel data from GitHub Innovation Graph, we hypothesize that ChatGPT enhances software production efficiency. Utilizing natural experiments where some governments banned ChatGPT, we employ Difference-in-Differences (DID), Synthetic Control (SC), and Synthetic Difference-in-Differences (SDID) methods to estimate its effects. Our findings indicate a significant positive impact on the number of git pushes, repositories, and unique developers per 100,000 people, particularly for high-level, general purpose, and shell scripting languages. These results suggest that AI tools like ChatGPT can substantially boost developer productivity, though further analysis is needed to address potential downsides such as low quality code and privacy concerns.

Date: 2024-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ain, nep-big, nep-cmp, nep-eff, nep-ino and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.11046 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2406.11046

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().