MCP servers and AI agents for the dismal science

What it does

This is an awesome-list that catalogs AI tools, libraries, and resources tailored for economists. It covers everything from MCP servers that let assistants query FRED and World Bank databases in plain English, to coding agents that execute Stata scripts inside VS Code, Cursor, and Claude Code. The list also includes resources for causal inference, literature review, LaTeX writing, and academic slide decks.

The interesting bit

The list is maintained by the OpenEcon team and prominently features their own tools—Stata-MCP, an Overleaf sync utility, and several “skills” for drafting and reviewing econ papers. That self-interest aside, the collection is unusually domain-specific: it treats econometrics, policy data portals, and Beamer templates as core infrastructure rather than niche footnotes.

Key highlights

• Dozens of MCP servers for economic data sources, including official World Bank Data360, U.S. Census Bureau, ECB, Eurostat, and IMF connectors.
• Stata-MCP, which lets AI assistants run .do files and view graphs without leaving modern editors.
• Curated sections for causal inference, macro modeling, NLP and sentiment analysis, and finance-specific AI tools.
• Several OpenEcon projects for automating paper writing, referee reports, and Beamer slide generation with timed speaker scripts.
• CC0 license and open to pull requests.

Caveats

• The list is heavily interleaved with the maintainer’s own OpenEcon projects, so editorial independence is blurry.

Verdict

Bookmark it if you are an economist or policy researcher wiring LLMs into data pipelines, Stata workflows, or LaTeX drafts. Skip it if you want general-purpose AI tooling—this list assumes you already know what a .do file is.