Revealing economic facts: LLMs know more than they say
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866917136130113536 |
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| author | Buckmann, Marcus Nguyen, Quynh Anh Hill, Edward |
| author_facet | Buckmann, Marcus Nguyen, Quynh Anh Hill, Edward |
| contents | We investigate whether the hidden states of large language models (LLMs) can be used to estimate and impute economic and financial statistics. Focusing on county-level (e.g. unemployment) and firm-level (e.g. total assets) variables, we show that a simple linear model trained on the hidden states of open-source LLMs outperforms the models' text outputs. This suggests that hidden states capture richer economic information than the responses of the LLMs reveal directly. A learning curve analysis indicates that only a few dozen labelled examples are sufficient for training. We also propose a transfer learning method that improves estimation accuracy without requiring any labelled data for the target variable. Finally, we demonstrate the practical utility of hidden-state representations in super-resolution and data imputation tasks. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_08662 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Revealing economic facts: LLMs know more than they say Buckmann, Marcus Nguyen, Quynh Anh Hill, Edward Computation and Language Machine Learning General Economics Economics I.2.7 We investigate whether the hidden states of large language models (LLMs) can be used to estimate and impute economic and financial statistics. Focusing on county-level (e.g. unemployment) and firm-level (e.g. total assets) variables, we show that a simple linear model trained on the hidden states of open-source LLMs outperforms the models' text outputs. This suggests that hidden states capture richer economic information than the responses of the LLMs reveal directly. A learning curve analysis indicates that only a few dozen labelled examples are sufficient for training. We also propose a transfer learning method that improves estimation accuracy without requiring any labelled data for the target variable. Finally, we demonstrate the practical utility of hidden-state representations in super-resolution and data imputation tasks. |
| title | Revealing economic facts: LLMs know more than they say |
| topic | Computation and Language Machine Learning General Economics Economics I.2.7 |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.08662 |