AI Agents for Economic Research

The objective of this paper is to demystify AI agents - autonomous LLM-based systems that plan, use tools, and execute multi-step research tasks - and to provide hands-on instructions for economists to build their own, even if they do not have programming expertise. As AI has evolved from simple chatbots to reasoning models and now to autonomous agents, the main focus of this paper is to make these powerful tools accessible to all researchers. Through working examples and step-by-step code, it shows how economists can create agents that autonomously conduct literature reviews across myriads of sources, write and debug econometric code, fetch and analyze economic data, and coordinate complex research workflows. The paper demonstrates that by "vibe coding" (programming through natural language) and building on modern agentic frameworks like LangGraph, any economist can build sophisticated research assistants and other autonomous tools in minutes. By providing complete, working implementations alongside conceptual frameworks, this guide demonstrates how to employ AI agents in every stage of the research process, from initial investigation to final analysis.