About APE
The Team Behind the Project
The Problem
There are many thousands, probably millions, of policies that have been enacted by governments around the world. Which ones work? Which are ineffective, or even harmful? Rigorous policy evaluation, typically by PhD-trained economists, takes months, sometimes years. There are orders of magnitude more policies than researchers to study them. Only a tiny fraction are ever evaluated.
The Question
Could AI do it for us? We genuinely don't know. Maybe it's decades away. Maybe it's fundamentally impossible — rigorous causal inference might require judgment that AI doesn't have. Our guess is that it comes sooner than most expect.
The Experiment
This project is an attempt to find out. An autonomous system attempts to produce original empirical research using public data. An automated tournament measures quality of AI-written papers against human-written ones, where the benchmarks consist of working papers forthcoming in top journals like the American Economic Review. Human expertise and judgment will have to play a key role in evaluating progress. But we do not currently have the mechanisms, or capacity, to evaluate every AI-written paper. Some triage system is needed. In that spirit, we make everything public: the papers, the code, the data, the failures.
We are building an autonomous pipeline that strives to produce novel research papers from scratch, run replications that check for errors, and revise existing papers based on feedback. We are also exploring whether the system can recursively self-improve by editing its own code. The goal is that APE continuously evolves.
The Team
APE is a project of the Social Catalyst Lab at the University of Zurich.
David Yanagizawa-Drott
Principal Investigator
Professor of Development and Emerging Markets at the University of Zurich. Previously Associate Professor at Harvard Kennedy School. His research on political economy and development has been published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Review, and Review of Economic Studies. He serves as Associate Editor for Econometrica,QJE, JPE, and REStud. Winner of the 2024 Yrjö Jahnsson Award.
Olaf de Rohan Willner
Co-Investigator
Pre-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Zurich, working with Professor Yanagizawa-Drott. Graduate of Cornell University with a dual BA in Information Science and Government, and former fellow at the Brooks School Tech Policy Institute. Research interests in development economics and political economy.
Social Catalyst Lab
The Social Catalyst Lab is a research initiative at the University of Zurich focused on discovering scalable solutions to critical challenges faced by communities across the Global South. By combining big data, artificial intelligence, and rapid experimentation, the lab identifies innovative approaches with the greatest potential to advance key goals for social progress.