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Learning the Macroeconomic Language

Siddhartha Chib, Fei Tan

arXiv 24 Dec 2025 · Econometrics

arXiv:2512.21031 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

We show how state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs), seemingly inapplicable to the small samples typical of macroeconomics, can be trained effectively for macroeconomic forecasting. We estimate a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model on an initial segment of the data to obtain a posterior distribution over structural parameters. We sample from this posterior to generate millions of theory-consistent synthetic panels that, when mixed with actual macroeconomic data, form the training corpus for a time-series transformer with attention. The trained model is then used to forecast out-of-sample through 2025. The results show that this hybrid forecaster, which combines the theoretical coherence of DSGE models with the representational power of modern LLMs, learns key features of the macroeconomic language.

Citation extraction

11
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14
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Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1Smets, Frank and Wouters, Rafael (2007) Shocks and Frictions in US Business Cycles: A Bayesian DSGE Approach0.73732100%
2Andrej Karpathy (2022) nanoGPT: The simplest, fastest repository for training/finetuning medium-sized GPTs0.5112250%
3Vaswani, Ashish and Shazeer, Noam and Parmar, Niki and Uszkoreit, Ja… (2017) Attention is All you Need0.40511100%
4David DeJong and Beth Ingram and Charles Whiteman (1993) Analyzing VARs with Monetary Business Cycle Model Priors0.40511100%
5Beth F. Ingram and Charles H. Whiteman (1994) Supplanting the Minnesota Prior: Forecasting Macroeconomic Time Series Using Real Business Cycle Model Priors0.40511100%
6Alexey Dosovitskiy and German Ros and Felipe Codevilla and Antonio L… (2017) CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator0.40511100%
7Siddhartha Chib and Minchul Shin and Fei Tan (2023) DSGE-SVt: An Econometric Toolkit for High-Dimensional DSGE Models with SV and $t$ Errors self0.40511100%
8Del Negro, Marco and Schorfheide, Frank (2004) Priors from General Equilibrium Models for VARS0.40511100%
9Yu Shi and Zongliang Fu and Shuo Chen and Bohan Zhao and Wei Xu and… (2025) Kronos: A Foundation Model for the Language of Financial Markets0.40511100%
10Tobin, Josh and Fong, Rachel and Ray, Alex and Schneider, Jonas and… (2017) Domain Randomization for Transferring Deep Neural Networks from Simulation to the Real World0.40511100%

Showing the top 10 of 11 scored citations.