economic policy analysts

Abstract: Many scientific phenomena are best understood as outcomes of underlying optimization problems, yet automated scientific discovery has largely focused on recovering equations that describe observed input-output patterns. We introduce OptScientist, a novel automated framework for discovering compact symbolic optimization laws directly from data. OptScientist comprises (i) a model that infers symbolic optimization problems by first learning to represent data as an optimization problem and then extracting its symbolic form, and (ii) an LLM agentic system embedding the model in a discovery process that integrates theoretical priors from scientific literature, discovers candidate laws, abstracts their underlying mechanisms, and suggests new data to collect. We first evaluate OptScientist on OptFeynman, a novel benchmark of 99 physics-derived optimization problems, where OptScientist recovers ground-truth laws for over 80% of the problems and remains robust to noisy contextual information, while substantially outperforming machine-learning, symbolic, and LLM-based model-discovery baselines. On human risky choice and central-bank monetary policy, OptScientist discovers compact symbolic optimization laws that achieve held-out predictive performance competitive with leading baselines, while using few parameters and substantially fewer tokens than LLM baselines. Overall, OptScientist extends automated scientific discovery to uncovering optimization laws that generate observed phenomena, enabling automated theory building across the physical, biological, behavioral, and social sciences.

Abstract: Simulating economic responses at society scale requires agents whose decisions reflect household circumstances and the effects of earlier actions. We introduce S$^2$-MAS, a society-scale multi-agent simulation framework built on 500 million synthetic household personas grounded in real-survey data. Its Genese engine separates decisions from state updates, while reusable financial scenarios and application ledgers track consumption, cash, debt and payments. FinL-mlx, a compact decision model trained with SFT + RLCD on 2.93 million examples, achieves 74.55% accuracy and 38.37% question-macro F1 in consumer financial-choice scenarios, outperforming Jev 1.13 and GLM-5.3-Flash on both measures. We evaluate eight financial task families and simulate 12 million distinct household agents in paired purchase-funding conditions. Jointly raising purchase goals and approved credit limits increases consumption, with responses differing across age and income groups. Education, employment and household-size differences persist after age--income standardization and mainly reflect transitions from deferral to purchase. Asset and debt groups differ in cash drawdown, repayment and closing debt. A 24-month panel varies purchase goals under a common credit product, with repayment and arrears updating subsequent offers. S$^2$-MAS links heterogeneous household decisions to evolving consumption, cash and repayment paths, supporting economic experiments across household groups, population scales and time horizons.

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to meet a key goal in economics: a quantitative model of household decision making, across a variety of settings. Yet existing evaluations cover few surveys and outcomes, and do not study how households adjust to changing economic conditions. We introduce a new evaluation, HouseholdBench, which unites 6 U.S. household surveys and 32 prediction tasks spanning numeric, categorical and probabilistic outcomes, related to consumption, income, labor, expectations, and housing. Using past behavior, demographics and macroeconomic conditions, the tasks test whether LLMs predict behavior, including how households adjust to changes in various policies. We evaluate 13 proprietary and open-weight LLMs against a no-change baseline and a gradient-boosted tree model. Most LLMs outperform the no-change baseline, including for policy response tasks -- with the best model lowering error for numeric outcomes by 12.2%. Across most tasks, gradient-boosted trees rank first; leading proprietary LLMs approach their performance, but open-weight models lag. LLMs exhibit systematic over- and underprediction across different tasks. We identify methods that enable a 4 billion parameter open-weight model to match proprietary models' performance: fine-tuning and aggregating 16 predictions per observation. Improvements generalize to policy-response tasks, which are excluded from fine-tuning. We release our datasets, code, and leaderboard on our website: https://jn-huang.github.io/householdbench

Abstract: Contextual specialization can improve forecasting accuracy, but a correction selected on one historical interval may become unreliable under temporal distribution shift. To address this issue, we propose RAEGL, a Risk-Aware Evidence-Gated Learning framework for selective contextual forecasting. RAEGL retains a validated global predictor by default and activates a contextual residual only when pre-deployment evidence supports its use. The framework separates candidate selection from gate calibration and jointly evaluates randomization significance, practically meaningful gain, and temporal stability. Experiments on real-world audits and controlled panels show how RAEGL can prevent harmful contextual deployment while making conservative opportunity costs explicit. In a reconstructed Our World in Data audit, exact fallback avoids RMSE degradations of 0.0960 and 0.0239 caused by two validation-selected corrections. In a sealed World Development Indicators evaluation, a region-based correction passes the randomization test but is withheld because its gain is only 0.000092, its country-clustered 95% confidence interval crosses zero, and only 0.02% of bootstrap replicates reach the practical threshold. In controlled panels, the stability- and support-aware extension activates in 97.2% of strong, stable-context runs while rejecting all high-drift settings. These results support RAEGL as an auditable, evidence-based mechanism for managing contextual deployment risk and as a conservative alternative to validation-driven contextual selection.