AI RESEARCH
Measuring What Cannot Be Surveyed: LLMs as Instruments for Latent Cognitive Variables in Labor Economics
arXiv CS.CL
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ArXi:2604.02403v1 Announce Type: cross This paper establishes the theoretical and practical foundations for using Large Language Models (LLMs) as measurement instruments for latent economic variables -- specifically variables that describe the cognitive content of occupational tasks at a level of granularity not achievable with existing survey instruments. I formalize four conditions under which LLM-generated scores constitute valid instruments: semantic exogeneity, construct relevance, monotonicity, and model invariance.