Nicolas L. Bottan

ifo/CESifo Visiting Researcher

Nicolas L. Bottan, Cornell University, ifo Munich and CESifo Guest from 3 to 15 November 2026.

Understanding AI 

During his visit at CESifo, Nicolas Bottan will focus on a new research agenda examining how people understand the economic consequences of artificial intelligence and how that understanding shapes their policy preferences. An ongoing project, joint with Marcel Preuss, studies whether teaching people a basic economic framework for understanding technological change affects how they think about artificial intelligence. In a randomized experiment with U.S. adults, the researchers examine how new technologies can either substitute for human labor or complement workers and increase their productivity. They then examine how these different ways of understanding AI shape expectations about the labor market, inequality, and personal economic prospects, as well as preferences over redistribution, taxation, and AI regulation.

Mr. Bottan is an applied microeconomist working at the intersection of behavioral, public, and development economics. His research studies how beliefs and social context shape economic decisions and what this implies for the design of public policy. A common theme across his work is that expectations, social comparisons, and information frictions can have important effects on behavior in settings ranging from housing markets and education to social protection. Much of his research uses field and survey experiments that generate exogenous changes in beliefs or information and connect these changes to consequential choices.

Nicolas Bottan is an Assistant Professor at the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy and the Department of Economics at Cornell University. Before joining the Cornell faculty, he was a Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell, and earlier in his career he worked as a Research Fellow at the Inter-American Development Bank. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.