AI at the Frontier of Economic Research
19 Pages Posted: 21 Mar 2024
Date Written: February 22, 2024
Abstract
The use of AI gets increasingly incorporated into economic research. Some of the applications include sentiment analysis, classification, clustering, or function approximation for the development of flexible models. Another promising development is the use of AI for the selective extraction of data that is subsequently analyzed by the conventional economic toolkit. Latter is enabled by the recent advances in image and language transformer models. This approach has the potential to significantly expand the possibilities for economic research as demonstrated by an example that extracts debt maturity data from thousands of PDF documents (Giesecke, 2023).
Keywords: research methods, artificial intelligence, public finance, debt structure, machine learning, vision models, medium-sized language models, LLMs, data collection, data curation
JEL Classification: C14, C38, C55, C81, C82, E43, E44, E62, G12, G14, H63, H74
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