Agentic Workflows for Economic Research: Design, Implementation, and Evaluation

Herbert Dawid, Philipp Harting, Hankui Wang, Zhongli Wang and Jiachen Yi

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) can now assist across the economic research lifecycle, yet general-purpose LLMs and agent systems give no assurance that their outputs meet the discipline's bar. We present an agentic-workflow methodology that carries a research question through the full lifecycle, from ideation and literature review through modeling, data, implementation, estimation, and reporting, across seven specialized teams under a cross-team orchestrator, with human-in-the-loop review at each stage. The methodology incorporates two commitments. The first, trustworthy execution, is a shared infrastructure that verifies outputs, records the provenance of every step, bounds each agent's authority, addresses agent-specific threats, and serves every LLM locally on open weights. The second, reasoning as an economist, makes disciplinary checks explicit in the workflow: agents state identification strategies for causal claims, check structural models against stylized facts by simulation, and search for counterexamples to theoretical claims. Together they produce a first research prototype in hours, with every step's provenance and verification verdict recorded. A two-tier framework evaluates the workflows across fourteen dimensions, combining execution-log metrics with a dual-judge LLM-as-reviewer ensemble across all seven teams.

Date: 2025-04, Revised 2026-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ain and nep-big
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.09736 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:2504.09736

Access Statistics for this paper

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