Can Artificial Intelligence Forecast Treatment Effects in Economics?

I use LLMs to forecast treatment effects of research studies pre-registered on the AEA RCT Registry and the Open Science Framework. I focus on studies whose results were first publicly released in 2026 and elicit forecasts from models whose training or knowledge cut-off dates were before the relevant set of papers was released. First, LLM models extract forecasting questions from the pre-registrations or pre-analysis plans. These questions elicit forecasted treatment effects; not all resolve in ...