Awesome AI for Economists

A curated list of AI tools, agent skills, libraries, and resources for economics research, teaching, and policy analysis.

Scope: AI tools and resources with specific value for economists, plus research on the economics of AI. General-purpose AI assistants and coding agents are in the Appendix.

Highlights: Projects from the OpenEcon team, which maintains this list. Entries in bold below are the team's own.

AI-research-setup - Step-by-step guide to setting up Claude Code and Codex for economics research on macOS and Windows.

OpenEcon Data - MCP server and web app for plain-English queries over 330,000+ indicators from FRED, World Bank, IMF, Eurostat, and more.

Stata-MCP - Runs Stata from VS Code, Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, and Copilot with real-time output, a data viewer, and graph display.

Econ Writing Skill - Economics paper-writing skill synthesizing 50+ guides by Cochrane, McCloskey, Shapiro, Head, and others.

Econ Paper Review Skill - Writes referee reports on economics papers with verified comments, editing notes, and a step-by-step revision plan; free for non-commercial use.

Econ Slides Skill - Turns a paper into a Beamer talk with a timed speaker script, including job-market and discussant decks.

overleaf-sync-now - Agent skill and CLI that pull recent Overleaf web edits into a Dropbox-synced copy before AI agents edit it.

Econ Auto Research - Vision-stage plan (no code yet) for an economist-directed AI pipeline from research question to working paper, with adversarial self-refereeing.

MCP Servers for Economic Data
Agent Skills for Economists
Coding Tools for Economists
AI Agents for Research
Causal Inference and Econometrics
Simulation, Forecasting and Macro Modeling
Literature Review and Research Discovery
Economic Data and Analysis
Academic Writing and LaTeX
Document Processing and OCR
NLP and Text as Data
Policy, Labor and Alternative Data
Finance-Specific AI
Data Collection Tools
Benchmarks and Evaluation
Papers and Books
Courses, Conferences and Community
Appendix: General-Purpose AI

MCP Servers for Economic Data

Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers let AI assistants query economic databases directly. Connect Claude, Cursor, or other MCP-compatible tools to live data from FRED, World Bank, IMF, and more.

Alpha Vantage MCP - Official server for stocks, forex, commodities, and economic indicators.
Data Commons MCP Server - Official Data Commons server, hosted with a free key or run locally, serving Census, World Bank, BLS, and WHO statistics.
ECB MCP Server - Query European Central Bank exchange rates, policy rates, yield curves, and euro-area monetary statistics.
Equibles MCP - Self-hosted, open-source server for SEC filings, XBRL financials, 13F holdings, insider trades, short interest, CFTC positioning, and federal contracts.
Eurostat MCP Server - Search, inspect, and query Eurostat datasets, including Comext detailed trade, PRODCOM, and NUTS regional data.
FRED MCP Connector - St. Louis Fed's official connector letting AI assistants search, fetch, and chart FRED series; requires only a free account.
FRED MCP Server - Community open-source FRED server run with your own free API key; a self-hostable alternative to the official connector.
IMF Data MCP Server - WEO forecasts, balance of payments, and more from the IMF.
Invokely - Hosted server for official U.S., EU, UK, Canadian, and Australian statistics, down to U.S. counties and Spanish municipalities.
MoSPI eSankhyiki MCP - Official Indian statistics ministry server for PLFS, CPI, national accounts, NSS surveys, and more.
Nasdaq Data Link MCP - Access Nasdaq/Quandl financial and economic datasets.
OECD MCP Server - Access 5,000+ OECD statistical datasets via SDMX API with prompt templates.
OpenEcon Data - MCP server and web app for plain-English queries over 330,000+ indicators from FRED, World Bank, IMF, Eurostat, and more.
SEC EDGAR MCP - Connects AI assistants to U.S. SEC EDGAR filings, financial statements, and insider-trading data.
StatCite - World Bank, IMF, and ECB statistics where every value carries a full citation, plus verification of claimed figures.
U.S. Census Bureau Data API MCP - Official Census Bureau server connecting AI assistants to demographic, economic, and population statistics.
UN Comtrade MCP Server - Access UN Comtrade international trade statistics with country and HS commodity code lookup.
World Bank Data360 MCP - Official World Bank server with a public hosted endpoint (no key needed) for searching, fetching, and charting Data360 indicators.
World Bank MCP Server - Community server for the legacy World Bank Open Data API (the official one is World Bank Data360 MCP above).

Browse the MCP Registry to discover more servers.

Agent Skills for Economists

Agent Skills are folders that an AI agent loads when a task needs them: a SKILL.md file of instructions, plus optional scripts and reference files. The open format works in Claude, Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and other agents.

AI Research Feedback - Claes Bäckman's (SAFE Frankfurt) skills for multi-agent referee reports plus pre-analysis-plan, grant, and replication-code reviews.
Awesome Journal Skills - Per-journal skill packs for AER, QJE, the AEJs, and hundreds of other venues, from topic choice to referee response.
awesome-econ-ai-stuff - Antonio Mele's (LSE) SKILL.md collection for Stata, R, and Python econometrics, data fetching, LaTeX tables, literature review, and modeling.
Claude Code Academic Workflow - Pedro Sant'Anna's (Emory) ready-to-fork template with 60+ skills, multi-agent review, quality gates, and replication protocols.
dynare-copilot - Skill turning macro model ideas into validated Dynare .mod files, drawing on 149 Macroeconomic Model Data Base models.
Econ Paper Review Skill - Writes referee reports on economics papers with verified comments, editing notes, and a step-by-step revision plan; free for non-commercial use.
Econ Slides Skill - Turns a paper into a Beamer talk with a timed speaker script, including job-market and discussant decks.
Econ Writing Skill - Economics paper-writing skill synthesizing 50+ guides by Cochrane, McCloskey, Shapiro, Head, and others.
MixtapeTools - Scott Cunningham's (Baylor) skills for independent code audits, cross-language replication, bibliography checks, and Beamer decks.
Stata Skill - Dylan Moore's (Hawaii) Stata reference skill covering econometrics, causal inference, Mata, and 20+ community packages such as reghdfe.
World Bank Reproducibility Skill - Official World Bank skill that audits and assembles replication packages, starting with a data-privacy check.

More skills: Academic Research Skills (research-to-publication pipeline, CC BY-NC) | Anthropic Skills (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF) | Posit Skills (Quarto, tidyverse, Shiny) | Scientific Agent Skills (statistics, FRED and World Bank lookups). Browse skills.sh for more. Skills can run code on your computer, so read a third-party skill's SKILL.md and scripts before installing it.

Coding Tools for Economists

AI assistants, agent connectors, and setup guides for Stata, R, MATLAB, Python, and notebooks. General-purpose coding agents are in the Appendix.

AI-research-setup - Step-by-step guide to setting up Claude Code and Codex for economics research on macOS and Windows.
Jupyter AI - Official JupyterLab extension bringing Claude, Codex, Gemini, and other agents into notebooks through a chat panel.
Jupyter MCP Server - MCP server and Claude Code plugin letting AI agents edit and run live Jupyter notebooks.
marimo - Reactive Python notebook stored as pure .py files with built-in AI assistant.
MATLAB MCP Server - Official MathWorks server letting Claude Code, Codex, and Copilot run, lint, and test code in your local MATLAB.
MCP-for-Stata - MCP server and CLI, with bundled Stata skills, letting Claude Code, Codex, and other agents run local Stata.
mcptools - Posit's R package letting Claude Code, Copilot, and other MCP clients run code in your live R sessions.
Posit Assistant - Posit's data-analysis agent for RStudio, Positron, and the terminal, working in live R and Python sessions with major model providers.
Positron - Free Posit data science IDE for R and Python, with the Posit Assistant agent built in.
Stata-MCP - Runs Stata from VS Code, Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, and Copilot with real-time output, a data viewer, and graph display.

AI Agents for Research

AI Agent Frameworks

Libraries for building your own LLM pipelines and agents, from data collection to analysis and reporting.

Agno - Open-source Python framework with memory, knowledge, and 100+ toolkits including MCP support.
chatlas - Posit's Python interface for LLMs with streaming, tool calling, and structured output.
CrewAI - Open-source Python framework for orchestrating role-based, collaborative multi-agent systems.
DSPy - Stanford NLP framework for building LLM pipelines from declarative Python modules, with optimizers that tune prompts and weights.
ellmer - Tidyverse R package for calling LLM APIs with tool calling and structured data extraction.
Google ADK - Google's modular multi-agent framework with MCP and A2A protocol support.
LangGraph - LangChain's low-level framework for stateful, durable agent workflows built as graphs.
Microsoft Agent Framework - Microsoft's successor to AutoGen and Semantic Kernel for multi-agent workflows in Python and .NET.
OpenAI Agents SDK - Lightweight Python framework for multi-agent workflows with handoffs, guardrails, and tracing.
Pydantic AI - Type-safe Python agent framework with validated structured outputs across all major model providers.
smolagents - Hugging Face's minimalist agent library where agents write actions as Python code.

Autonomous Research Agents

Systems that turn a research question into a cited report, an analysis, or a draft paper.

DeerFlow - ByteDance's research SuperAgent for long-horizon tasks with sandboxed code execution.
Econ Auto Research - Vision-stage plan (no code yet) for an economist-directed AI pipeline from research question to working paper, with adversarial self-refereeing.
GPT Researcher - Autonomous deep research agent producing cited reports from web sources.
Kosmos - Edison Scientific's AI scientist that reads literature, analyzes datasets, and generates hypotheses in long autonomous runs.
Project APE - University of Zurich experiment in which AI agents wrote 1,000 open policy-evaluation papers, ranked by LLM judges against AER/AEJ papers.
The AI Scientist - Sakana AI system that generates ML research ideas, runs experiments, and writes and reviews LaTeX papers (Nature 2026; template-free v2).

Causal Inference and Econometrics

Core Libraries

awesome-causal-inference - Curated list of causal inference resources, courses, and tools.
causal-learn - Causal discovery algorithms (PC, FCI, GES) from the PyWhy ecosystem.
CausalMatch - ByteDance's Python package for propensity score matching and coarsened exact matching, with machine-learning propensity models.
CausalML - Uber's uplift modeling and causal inference with machine learning.
CausalPy - Bayesian causal inference for quasi-experiments (DiD, synthetic control, RDD) powered by PyMC, with bundled agent skills.
ddml - Double/debiased ML with stacked learners for Stata (Ahrens, Hansen, Schaffer, Wiemann), with a sister R package.
DoubleML - Double/debiased ML (Chernozhukov et al., 2018) in Python and R; the Python package adds DiD, RDD, and panel fixed-effects models.
DoWhy - End-to-end causal inference: model, identify, estimate, refute.
EconML - Microsoft/PyWhy library for heterogeneous treatment effects via Double ML and causal forests.
grf - Generalized Random Forests for heterogeneous treatment effects (Athey, Tibshirani, Wager).
marginaleffects - Predictions, slopes, marginal means, and contrasts for 100+ model classes in R and Python, with an official agent skill.
policytree - R package for learning shallow-tree treatment-assignment rules via doubly robust empirical welfare maximization (Athey and Wager).
pyfixest - Fast high-dimensional fixed-effects regression in Python with IV, Poisson, and modern difference-in-differences estimators.
xtdml - Stata module for double machine learning in static panel models with fixed effects.

Difference-in-Differences and Synthetic Control

CImpact - Causal impact for time series with frequentist and Bayesian methods.
contdid - DiD with continuous treatment, by Brantly Callaway.
diff-diff - Python DiD library with Callaway-Sant'Anna, imputation, synthetic DiD, continuous treatment, and Honest DiD, benchmarked against R.
differences - Python implementation of Callaway and Sant'Anna staggered difference-in-differences with multiple periods and triple differences.
mlsynth - Python library bundling dozens of synthetic control estimators under one API, cross-checked against original implementations.
moderndid - Modern DiD estimators (staggered, continuous, triple, Honest DiD) under one API, scaling to GPUs and Spark or Dask clusters.
pysyncon - Python synthetic control suite with classic, augmented, penalized, and robust estimators plus placebo inference.
scpi - Synthetic control with prediction intervals for single, multiple, and staggered-adoption units, in R, Python, and Stata.

Inference with AI-Generated Data

Valid estimates and standard errors when regression variables come from LLM or ML predictions.

dsl - Egami, Hinck, Stewart, and Wei's R package for valid regression inference using LLM-annotated variables plus a small expert-coded sample.
ppi_py - Prediction-powered inference (Science 2023): valid confidence intervals combining a small labeled sample with many ML or LLM predictions.
ValidMLInference - Python package for bias-corrected inference with AI/ML-generated covariates (Battaglia, Christensen, Hansen, Sacher); the R port is MLBC on CRAN.

LLM and Foundation-Model Causal Tools

Causal AI Scientist - LLM agent that answers causal questions by choosing and running DiD, IV, RDD, or adjustment estimators, with assumption checks.
Causal-Copilot - LLM agent automating end-to-end causal discovery, inference, and reporting from natural-language queries.
CausalFM - Foundation models for causal inference; pre-trained models replace per-problem estimation (ICLR 2026).
CausalPFN - Prior-fitted transformer for amortized, in-context ATE and CATE estimation without per-dataset retraining.

Simulation, Forecasting and Macro Modeling

Agent-Based Models and LLM Simulation

AgentSociety - Tsinghua's LLM-agent platform for social-science experiments (AgentSociety 2, 2026), plus the legacy city simulator with economic modules.
BeforeIT.jl - Bank of Italy's agent-based macroeconomic model in Julia.
Concordia - Google DeepMind library for generative agent-based modeling of social, economic, and market interactions.
EconAgent - LLM agents with personality traits simulating macroeconomic activities (ACL 2024).
LLM-ABM Survey - Tsinghua's paper list accompanying its LLM agent-based modeling survey (Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2024).
LLM-Economist - Mechanism design with 3–1,000+ LLM agents for optimal taxation research.
Magentic Marketplace - Microsoft Research environment simulating two-sided markets of LLM buyer and seller agents to study welfare and manipulation.
MarS - Microsoft engine simulating financial markets via a generative Large Market Model of order flow.
Mesa - Python agent-based modeling framework; its Mesa-LLM extension adds language-model decision-making to agents.

Forecasting and Nowcasting

Chronos - Amazon's pretrained forecasting models; Chronos-2 adds zero-shot multivariate and covariate-informed forecasting.
Durbyn.jl - Julia port of R's forecast package.
Moirai (uni2ts) - Salesforce's library for Moirai time-series foundation models (latest Moirai 2.0), with pre-training, fine-tuning, and evaluation code.
neuralforecast - Neural forecasting models (N-BEATS, NHITS, Transformers) for economic time series.
Project Spectrum - BIS/ECB/Bundesbank project using GenAI embeddings to classify 34M products for inflation nowcasting (2026 report).
statsforecast - Fast statistical forecasting for econometric time series.
Sundial - Generative time-series foundation models giving probabilistic forecasts via flow matching without discrete tokenization.
tabpfn-time-series - Zero-shot time-series forecasting that repurposes the TabPFN-v2 tabular foundation model, no training needed.
TimeGPT - Nixtla's closed-source, API-based time-series foundation model with a free trial; TimeGPT-2.1 adds multivariate forecasting.
TimesFM - Google's time-series foundation model; TimesFM 3.0 (2026) adds zero-shot multivariate forecasting with covariates (self-hosted weights are non-commercial).
TiRex-2 - NX-AI's zero-shot forecaster extending TiRex to multivariate series with past and future-known covariates (NeurIPS 2026, Apache-2.0).
Toto - Datadog's Apache-2.0 time-series foundation models; Toto 2.0 (2026) spans 4M to 2.5B parameters.

Game Theory and Mechanism Design

Axelrod - Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma research with 200+ strategies and tournament simulations.
Nashpy - Two-player game solver with support enumeration, vertex enumeration, and Lemke-Howson.
OpenSpiel - Google DeepMind library of games with equilibrium-finding and multi-agent learning algorithms such as CFR and PSRO.
pygambit - Game theory computation for extensive and strategic form games with a Python API.

DSGE and Structural Models

Deep Learning for Solving and Estimating Dynamic Models in Economics and Finance - Simon Scheidegger's (Lausanne) open course with runnable notebooks applying deep equilibrium nets and PINNs to DSGE, OLG, and heterogeneous-agent models.
econpizza - JAX-based solver for fully nonlinear heterogeneous-agent (HANK) macroeconomic models via automatic differentiation.
gEconpy - DSGE toolkit in Python.
MacroModelling.jl - Julia DSGE toolkit.
OpenSourceEconomics - JAX-compatible DC-EGM, Kalman filters, and econ-project-templates.
optimagic - Numerical optimization for economists (formerly estimagic).
Structural Reinforcement Learning - JAX tutorials by Yang, Wang, Schaab, and Moll solving heterogeneous-agent models with aggregate risk via policy gradients.

Literature Review and Research Discovery

alphaXiv - Line-by-line discussion on arXiv papers with AI-powered analysis.
ASReview - Active learning for systematic reviews, reducing screening time by up to 95% (Nature Machine Intelligence).
Asta - Ai2's agentic-science assistant for paper finding, cited literature reports, and data analysis; successor to the OpenScholar demo.
Connected Papers - Visual graphs of related papers from a seed paper.
Consensus - AI academic search with quote-linked citations, a multi-step research agent, and API and MCP access.
Elicit - Research agent and PRISMA 2020-aligned systematic reviews over 138M papers, with data extraction and an API and MCP server.
Google Scholar Labs - Free AI mode in Google Scholar that breaks down research questions and explains how each paper addresses them; sign-in required.
Inciteful - Free citation network analysis using graph algorithms to find key papers and connections.
Litmaps - Dynamic multi-seed citation mapping with monitored searches and daily alerts for new papers.
Meta-Mar - Free meta-analysis platform where AI reads PDFs and extracts quantitative outcomes.
MindMap AI - Turns research papers, PDFs, and notes into structured visual mind maps for literature synthesis.
OpenAlex - Fully open catalog of scholarly works with a free REST API and semantic search.
PaperQA2 - RAG system for question answering and summarization over scientific literature.
Rayyan - AI-assisted screening and data extraction for systematic reviews, with team collaboration, PRISMA flow diagrams, and a free basic tier.
ResearchRabbit - Citation network and semantic similarity discovery rebuilt with Litmaps.
SciSpace - Deep review with iterative search and Zotero integration across 280M papers.
Scite - Smart Citations classifying 1.6B+ citations as supporting or contrasting, plus an AI assistant, Reference Check, and MCP access.
Semantic Scholar - AI-powered academic search with citation analysis, TLDR summaries, and free API across 220M+ papers.
Suppr - AI literature search, document translation, and deep-research reports over PubMed and OpenAlex, with a Zotero plugin.
Undermind - Autonomously reads hundreds of papers and produces structured reports with timelines and categories.
Zotero MCP - Connects your Zotero library to Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, and Cursor to search, read, annotate, and cite papers.
Zotero PapersGPT - Zotero AI plugin supporting ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and more for PDF chat and summaries.

Economic Data and Analysis

AI Data Analysis Platforms

Julius AI - Upload datasets and ask questions in natural language; returns charts, regressions, and reports.
Microsoft Data Formulator - Describe charts in English and get publication-quality output with Python code.

Economic Data Sources

FRED API v2 - Bulk retrieval of all series in any release across 800,000+ time series.
FXMacroData - API and MCP server for macroeconomic releases, calendars, FX, commodities, and bond yields, queryable in plain English.
Global Macro Database - Macroeconomic dataset, free for academic use, covering 239 countries from 1086 to 2025 with forecasts to 2031, plus MCP access.
UN System Data Commons - Official UN statistics portal (successor to UNdata) built on Data Commons, with natural-language search and MCP access.

Academic Writing and LaTeX

Agent skills for paper writing, refereeing, and slides are listed under Agent Skills for Economists above.

bibverify - Verifies BibTeX entries against Crossref, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, and arXiv via CLI, MCP server, or agent skill.
OpenAI Prism - Free LaTeX workspace with citation management, Zotero sync, sketch-to-equation, and real-time collaboration.
Overleaf AI - LaTeX error fixing, table and equation generation, and writing feedback, included in all Overleaf plans with a basic free allowance.
overleaf-sync-now - Agent skill and CLI that pull recent Overleaf web edits into a Dropbox-synced copy before AI agents edit it.
Paperpal - Academic writing assistant on Overleaf, Google Docs, and Chrome.
Refine.ink - AI technical verification flagging errors in reasoning, calculations, and references; used by AEA and Econometric Society journals.
Thesify - AI reviewer evaluating argumentation, methodology, and rigor.
Typst - Markup-based typesetting system and LaTeX alternative with simpler syntax, incremental compilation, and a collaborative web editor.
Underleaf - Chrome extension for image-to-LaTeX and smart citation generation.

Document Processing and OCR

Chandra - Datalab's open-weight OCR model converting images and PDFs to Markdown or JSON, handling handwriting, forms, and complex tables.
CHURRO - Stanford's open-weight OCR model for handwritten and printed historical documents across 46 language clusters (EMNLP 2025).
DeepSeek-OCR - Open-weight vision model converting document images to Markdown with formula and table recognition, succeeded by DeepSeek-OCR 2 in 2026.
Docling - Open-source parser, created at IBM, converting PDFs, Office files, scans, and XBRL financial reports into Markdown or JSON.
eScriptorium - Open-source platform for segmenting, transcribing, and OCR-ing historical and handwritten manuscripts.
Marker - Converts PDFs, Office files, and images to Markdown or JSON with tables, equations, and forms; LLM mode merges cross-page tables.
Mathpix - Screenshot-to-LaTeX OCR for equations, tables, and diagrams with PDF-to-Overleaf conversion.
MinerU - Converts PDFs, scans, Office files, and e-books into LLM-ready Markdown or JSON with tiered local parsing (v4, 2026).
Mistral OCR - Pay-per-page document OCR API returning text with bounding boxes, block types, and confidence scores in 170 languages.
olmOCR - Ai2's fully open OCR toolkit and model (olmOCR 2) for tables, equations, and handwriting, plus the olmOCR-Bench benchmark.
PaddleOCR-VL - Compact 0.9B vision-language OCR (v1.6, 2026) extracting layout, formulas, tables, and charts, including from historical documents.
Pix2Text - Open-source tool recognizing layouts, tables, and math formulas in images, exporting LaTeX and Markdown.
Surya - Open-source OCR toolkit for 90+ languages with layout, reading-order, and table recognition.
Transkribus - Cooperative-run platform transcribing handwritten and printed historical documents with 300+ community AI models; 50 free credits monthly.

NLP and Text as Data

CentralBankRoBERTa - Fine-tuned RoBERTa for sentiment classification in central bank communications.
ChronoGPT - Open language models with yearly checkpoints (1999–2024), each trained only on text available through that year to avoid lookahead bias.
EconBERTa - World Bank DeBERTa trained on 9.4B tokens from 1.5M economics papers with NER.
FinBERT - Fine-tuned BERT for financial sentiment, widely cited in economics and finance research.
GABRIEL - OpenAI toolkit turning text, images, or audio into quantitative measures for social scientists.
LinkTransformer - Arora and Dell's (Harvard) Python package for transformer-based record linkage, deduplication, and classification of messy text in dataframes.
OccCANINE - Model converting free-text occupational descriptions in 13 languages into HISCO codes with about 96% accuracy.
WorldCentralBanks - Annotated corpus and per-bank models classifying monetary policy stance in central bank communications worldwide.

Policy, Labor and Alternative Data

Policy and Evidence Synthesis

EUROMOD - EU tax-benefit microsimulation covering all 27 member states (open-source, EUPL-1.2).
ImpactAI - World Bank DIME tool synthesizing RCT evidence with effect sizes across interventions.
OpenFisca - Open-source microsimulation engine for computing taxes and benefits on population data.
PolicyEngine - Open-source tax-benefit microsimulation for the U.S., UK, and Canada with a free web app, API, and Claude Code plugin.

Labor Market Data

Lightcast - Global job-postings and skills data across 165 countries, plus the free Open Skills taxonomy of 34,000+ skills.
LinkedIn Economic Graph - Research and interactive data on hiring, skills, and AI's effect on work, including the monthly LinkedIn Workforce Report.
Revelio Labs - Workforce data with free monthly RPLS U.S. labor statistics, a monthly AI Labor Market Tracker, and academic access via WRDS.

AI Adoption and Exposure Trackers

AI Economic Indicators - Stanford Digital Economy Lab's monthly dashboards on AI's effects on employment, adoption, and consumer surplus.
Anthropic Economic Index - CC BY dataset and recurring reports on Claude use by O*NET task, occupation, and region, queryable through a Claude connector.
Census BTOS - Census Bureau's biweekly business survey tracking current and expected AI use by sector, state, and firm size.
GenAI Adoption Tracker - Bick, Blandin, and Deming's nationally representative survey of U.S. generative AI use at work and home.
GPTs are GPTs - Task- and occupation-level LLM exposure scores for O*NET from Eloundou et al. (Science, 2024).
Indeed Hiring Lab AI Tracker - Daily share of Indeed job postings mentioning AI in nine countries since 2019, under CC BY 4.0.
Microsoft Global AI Diffusion Report - Quarterly telemetry-based estimates of generative AI use among working-age adults in 147 economies.
OpenAI Signals - OpenAI's economic research hub with quarterly downloadable data on ChatGPT adoption and use by country, age, and task.
Ramp AI Index - Monthly share of U.S. businesses on Ramp paying for AI tools, by industry, size, and provider; also on FRED.
Yale Budget Lab AI Tracker - Regularly updated CPS-based analysis, with data, of whether AI is shifting U.S. occupations and unemployment.

Spatial, Satellite and Alternative Data

AlphaEarth Satellite Embeddings - Google DeepMind's annual global 10-meter, 64-dimension satellite embeddings since 2017 on Earth Engine.
Clay Foundation Model - Open foundation model for Earth observation generating embeddings from global multi-sensor satellite imagery.
MOSAIKS - Precomputed satellite-imagery features and API for predicting local socioeconomic outcomes, including HDI for 61,530 municipalities (Nature Communications, 2026).
Overture Maps - Open global geospatial data of places, buildings, addresses, and transportation, released monthly.

Finance-Specific AI

ai-hedge-fund - Educational multi-agent system mimicking famous investors to research stocks and propose trading decisions.
awesome-quant - Curated quantitative finance resources.
Dexter - Autonomous financial research agent with task planning and real-time data.
EdgarTools - Python library turning SEC EDGAR filings and XBRL financials into DataFrames and LLM-ready text, with a built-in MCP server.
Fin-R1 - Financial reasoning LLM by Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.
FinGPT - Open-source financial LLMs for sentiment, forecasting, and reports.
FinRobot - AI agent platform for financial analysis combining LLMs, RL, and quantitative methods.
OpenBB - Open-source data platform connecting financial and economic data to Python and AI agents via MCP, stewarded by the non-profit OpenBQ.
TradingAgents - Multi-agent LLM framework simulating analyst, researcher, trader, and risk-manager roles for trading decisions.

Data Collection Tools

Web Scraping

Crawl4AI - Open-source web crawler producing LLM-ready markdown for RAG and data pipelines.
Crawlee - Open-source crawling and scraping library that extracts web data for AI, LLM, and RAG pipelines.
Firecrawl - Open-source API turning websites into LLM-ready Markdown or structured JSON, with an AI agent for schema-based extraction.
ScrapeGraphAI - LLM-powered scraping that adapts to website changes automatically.

Survey and Qualitative Research

ATLAS.ti - Qualitative data analysis software with AI coding, document chat, and transcription, plus a free trial and student licenses.
Conversations at Scale - Geiecke and Jaravel's (LSE) platform for AI-led qualitative interviews, free for non-commercial research.
EDSL - Open-source Python library from Expected Parrot (co-founded by economist John Horton) for surveys and experiments with LLM agents.
QualCoder - Open-source qualitative coding app for text, images, audio, and video, with an AI agent that searches data and proposes codes.
Twin-2K-500 - Columbia dataset of 2,058 U.S. respondents answering about 500 survey and behavioral-economics questions, for testing LLM digital twins.

Warning: Nature reports AI chatbots infiltrating online surveys. Implement detection for MTurk/Prolific studies.

Synthetic Data

MOSTLY AI - Open-source SDK generating synthetic tabular, multi-table, and time-series data locally, with optional differential privacy.
REaLTabFormer - World Bank library using transformers to generate synthetic single-table and relational data.
SDV - Open-source synthetic data generation with CTGAN, CopulaGAN, and GaussianCopula models.
Synthcity - Generates and benchmarks synthetic tabular, time-series, and survival data with privacy and fairness metrics.

Benchmarks and Evaluation

Benchmarks and leaderboards for judging how well AI handles economic reasoning, forecasting, finance, replication, and real work tasks.

ForecastBench - Forecasting Research Institute's live benchmark of LLM vs. superforecaster accuracy, including FRED-based questions (ICLR 2025).
GDPval - OpenAI benchmark of real work tasks in 44 occupations from the top nine U.S. GDP sectors, with 220 tasks open-sourced.
Open Financial LLM Leaderboard - Public leaderboard benchmarking LLMs across financial NLP, question answering, and forecasting tasks.
Remote Labor Index - Scale AI and CAIS benchmark of 240 real freelance projects, measuring the share AI agents complete at professional quality.
REPRO-Bench - Benchmark of 112 social-science papers, mainly economics and political science, testing whether AI agents can assess reproducibility (ACL Findings 2025).
STEER - UBC benchmarks of LLM economic rationality and microeconomic reasoning (ICML 2024, NeurIPS 2025).

Papers and Books

Key Papers

Grouped by theme, newest first.

Using AI in Economic Research

AI-Assisted Teams Outperform AI-Led Teams but Not Human-Only Teams in Assessing Research Reproducibility in Quantitative Social Science - Brodeur et al. (2026), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Teaching Economics to the Machines - Chen et al. (2026), NBER Working Paper 34713.
Performing Valid Inference with AI/ML-Generated Covariates: A Guide for Empirical Practice - Christensen and Hansen (2026), AEA Papers and Proceedings.
A Practitioner's Guide to Using Large Language Models and Generative AI in Economic History - Ferrara (2026), NBER Working Paper 35374.
Large Language Models: An Applied Econometric Framework - Ludwig, Mullainathan, and Rambachan (2026), Annual Review of Economics.
Machine Learning Who to Nudge: Causal vs Predictive Targeting in a Field Experiment on Student Financial Aid Renewal - Athey, Keleher, and Spiess (2025), Journal of Econometrics.
Artificial Intelligence in Economics Research: What Have We Learned? What Do We Need to Learn? - Bahoo et al. (2025), Journal of Economic Surveys.
Deep Learning for Economists - Dell (2025), Journal of Economic Literature.
Difference-in-Difference Causal Forests with an Application to Payroll Tax Incidence in Norway - Gavrilova, Langørgen, and Zoutman (2025), Journal of Applied Econometrics.
AI Agents for Economic Research - Korinek (2025), NBER Working Paper 34202.
Economics in the Age of Algorithms - Mullainathan (2025), AEA Papers and Proceedings.
Machine Learning as a Tool for Hypothesis Generation - Ludwig and Mullainathan (2024), Quarterly Journal of Economics.
Large Language Models as Simulated Economic Agents: What Can We Learn from Homo Silicus? - Horton, Filippas, and Manning (2023), NBER Working Paper 31122.
Generative AI for Economic Research: Use Cases and Implications for Economists - Korinek (2023), Journal of Economic Literature.

Economics of AI

The Emerging Market for Intelligence: How Firms Buy and Sell AI - Demirer, Fradkin, and Tadelis (2026), Journal of Economic Perspectives.
AI and Our Economic Future - Jones (2026), Journal of Economic Perspectives.
Economic Scenarios for Transformative AI - Korinek et al. (2026), CEPR Discussion Paper 21939.
The Simple Macroeconomics of AI - Acemoglu (2025), Economic Policy.
Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence - Brynjolfsson, Chandar, and Chen (2025), Stanford Digital Economy Lab working paper.
A Research Agenda for the Economics of Transformative AI - Brynjolfsson, Korinek, and Agrawal (2025), NBER Working Paper 34256.
Generative AI at Work - Brynjolfsson, Li, and Raymond (2025), Quarterly Journal of Economics.
How People Use ChatGPT - Chatterji et al. (2025), NBER Working Paper 34255.

Books

Applied Causal Inference Powered by ML and AI - Free textbook by Chernozhukov, Hansen, Kallus, Spindler, and Syrgkanis on double/debiased ML, with R and Python notebooks.
The Economics of Transformative AI - Agrawal, Brynjolfsson, and Korinek's NBER volume of 16 studies on AI agents, labor, growth, and risk (UChicago Press, 2026).
The Means of Prediction - Maximilian Kasy on how AI works and who benefits (UChicago Press, 2025).
The Scaling Era - Dwarkesh Patel and Gavin Leech's oral history of AI from interviews with Amodei, Hassabis, Zuckerberg, and others (Stripe Press, 2025).

Courses, Conferences and Community

Courses, Guides and Tutorials

AI for Economic Theorists and Mathematicians - Markus' Academy series by Pietro Ortoleva and Fedor Sandomirskiy (Princeton) on AI for modeling and proofs.
AI for Economists - Jesse Lastunen's curated, filterable directory of papers, courses, tools, and talks on AI in economics.
AI Tools for Economists and Policy Analysts - Will Rinehart's (AEI) regularly updated guide mapping AI tools and prompts to economics and policy tasks.
Claude Blattman - Chris Blattman's (UChicago) open-source guide to AI research workflows with Claude Code, no coding required, plus an installable skills plugin.
Claude Code for Applied Economists - Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham's (Yale) eight-episode video series on data work, scraping, skills, sandboxing, and Overleaf.
Data Analysis with AI - Gábor Békés's (CEU) eight-session open course using AI coding agents for data wrangling, econometrics, text as data, and DiD.
EconDL - Melissa Dell's companion site to Deep Learning for Economists, with demo notebooks, software resources, and lectures.
Economics of Transformative AI - Stanford Digital Economy Lab summer course (2025) with open slides, exercises, and recorded lectures.
genaiforecon.org - Korinek's companion site to his JEL survey, with periodic updates on LLM tools; the latest (August 2025) covers AI agents.
How to Learn and Teach Economics with LLMs - Cowen and Tabarrok's (GMU) practical guide to using GPT for learning, teaching, and researching economics.
Machine Learning and Causal Inference - Video course from Susan Athey's Stanford GSB lab on ML for treatment effects, heterogeneous impacts, and targeting, with R tutorials.
ML and Economics at Oxford - Maximilian Kasy's reading group.
Modern AI for Economics Research - Markus' Academy talk by Benjamin Golub on Cursor, AI refereeing, and prompting for research.
NBER Methods Lecture: AI-Generated Data - Melissa Dell and Ashesh Rambachan's 2026 Summer Institute lectures on estimation and inference with AI-generated data.
Reflections on Vibe Researching - Joshua Gans (Toronto) on where LLMs aid theory work and where human judgment stays essential.
Research in the Time of AI - Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham (Yale) on where AI compresses the research timeline and where taste matters.
The Economics of AI - Anton Korinek's (UVA) Coursera course on AI's implications for economic growth, labor markets, inequality, and policy.
Using AI in Research and Teaching - Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham's (Yale) 2024 practical guide to Copilot in VS Code, chat LLMs, and local models for research and teaching.

Conferences

ESIF Economics and AI+ML Meeting - Econometric Society's biennial interdisciplinary meeting on economics and AI/ML (latest: Cornell, June 16–17, 2026).
NBER Digital Economics and AI Meeting - Stanford, January 21–22, 2027; paper submissions and PhD tutorial applications due November 3, 2026.
NBER Economics of AI Conference - Annual fall conference in Toronto organized by Agrawal, Gans, Goldfarb, and Tucker (latest: September 23–24, 2026).

Community

Podcasts: Dwarkesh Podcast | Exponential View | Justified Posteriors (Benzell and Fradkin)

Institutions: EconTAI | NBER Digital Economics and AI | OECD.AI | Stanford DEL

Appendix: General-Purpose AI

Widely known tools listed for completeness with notes on what economists specifically value.

ChatGPT - Deep Research that can focus on sites you trust, a Work agent for spreadsheets and decks, and an Excel add-in.
Claude - Coding help for Stata, R, and Python, 1M-token context for long documents, Research mode, and Claude for Excel.
Claude Code - Anthropic's agentic coding tool for the terminal, IDE, desktop app, and browser, extensible with MCP servers and agent skills.
Cline - Open-source coding agent for VS Code and the terminal that works with many model providers, including local models.
Cursor - AI code editor with agent mode, parallel Cloud Agents, and a free Hobby tier.
DeepSeek - MIT-licensed open-weight models with 1M-token context, plus a low-cost API for large-scale text classification.
Gemini - Deep Research reports from hundreds of sites (optionally your Gmail and Drive), with Canvas for drafts and visuals.
Gemini Notebook - Formerly NotebookLM: cited Q&A over your papers, Audio and Video Overviews, and code execution for data analysis on paid tiers.
GitHub Copilot - Free and Student plans, agent mode in VS Code, a cloud coding agent, and completions-only support in RStudio.
Ollama - Free local runner for open-weight models (gpt-oss, Qwen, Gemma, DeepSeek), so confidential microdata never leaves your machine.
OpenAI Codex - Coding agent in the ChatGPT desktop app, open-source CLI, and IDE, running parallel local and cloud tasks with reusable skills.
OpenCode - Open-source coding agent for the terminal and desktop that works with 75+ model providers, including local models.
Perplexity - Cited answers with an Academic source filter for scholarly papers, plus multi-step Research reports.

Contributing

Contributions welcome! Read the contribution guidelines first.