When President Donald Trump announced a wave of tariffs in early 2025, he launched a war of words. Threats and counterthreats flew across the Atlantic and Pacific in a swirl of escalation, retaliation, and reprieve. Economists were hard-pressed to get a clear picture of what was happening beyond the headlines. Solid numbers would not be available for weeks or months, and when they arrived they would capture only part of the story.

“As economists, we would like to track how all this geoeconomic pressure gets applied,” says Antonio Coppola, an assistant professor of finance at Stanford Graduate School of Business and a faculty fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). “But a lot of it is not going to show up in the standard tabular data sets.”

‘‘It’s really exciting that AI tools designed to analyze language can be easily adapted to solve very different problems across the sciences.’
—Susan Athey

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