Source: Marginal REVOLUTION
The real constraint in empirical economics isn't statistical methods or computing power—it's the labor-intensive work of collecting and cleaning primary source data. If AI agents can reliably automate this task, researchers without institutional resources or grant funding gain access to work that previously required both. The risk is methodological: bad datasets embedded in automated pipelines could propagate errors at scale, while good ones could unlock insights from previously inaccessible sources like archives, corporate filings, or regional records.