Education and Study · News · 🇺🇸 United States · via agentusecases.ai
Economist uses Claude Code to collect and analyze public data
A Yale professor showed the agent finding U.S. Census data, cleaning spreadsheets and building a database from company filings.
- Profession
- Researcher, Teacher
- Tools
- Claude Code, DuckDB
- Country
- 🇺🇸 United States
- Found via
- agentusecases.ai (Alex Finn) ↗
- Report date
- March 29, 2026
- Verified on
- October 28, 2026
What they did
In an online series for economists, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham asked Claude Code for U.S. homeownership data: the agent found the Census source, worked around scraping problems, cleaned the spreadsheets and wrote the charting scripts. In another episode it scraped companies' annual reports from the SEC, extracted the risk factors and built a DuckDB database.
How it went
The database showed tariff-related risks appearing more often and in more detail in recent reports. According to the series page, the messy filings became usable research data in a few minutes.
Good to know
The author stresses planning first and reviewing results at every round. Check the original data source and the chart's numbers before using them in academic work.
The prompt
I'm researching [question, e.g. how homeownership rates changed by age group]. Find the right public data from [source, e.g. Census Bureau or SEC filings], download it, clean it and store it in a DuckDB database in this folder. Then make a chart and a short summary of what the data shows, with the source links and any gaps or caveats. Show me the plan before you start.
Replace what is in [brackets]. Prompt written by us from the account, not a literal copy of the source. Do not paste other people’s personal data (privacy laws such as LGPD and GDPR apply).
Summary in our own words. Results as stated in the original account; we have not tested or audited them. Read the source ↗ Case found via agentusecases.ai (Alex Finn); text and prompt rewritten by us. Found a mistake?
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