The people behind MacroLab AI.
MacroLab AI was started by two researchers who have spent their careers turning text and data into economic insight.
Leif Anders Thorsrud is a Professor at BI Norwegian Business School. He is a member of the Centre for Applied Macroeconomics and Commodity Prices at BI and developed and leads the school’s Master in Data Science for Business program.
Thorsrud obtained his Ph.D. from BI Norwegian Business School in 2014, and today he is among the most highly cited empirical macroeconomists in Norway. His research has been published in top field international journals, and his areas of expertise include time series analysis, high-dimensional statistics, business cycles, energy economics, and monetary and fiscal economics. Currently his research agenda centers on how multimodal data and AI can be used to understand and predict economic fluctuations.
Thorsrud has previously worked as a data scientist and Senior Researcher in Norges Bank and the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. He is also the co-author of the book “Applied Time Series for Macroeconomics” and had the academic responsibility for the Norges Bank Watch reports in 2023 and 2024.
Vegard Høghaug Larsen works in the Department of Data Science and Analytics at BI Norwegian Business School, where he leads the school’s newly started research center, the Center for Disruptive Technologies (CDT). He is a Distinguished CESifo Affiliate and is also affiliated with the Centre for Applied Macroeconomics and Commodity Prices.
His work is at the intersection of economics and data science, using machine learning and natural language processing to study the transmission of economic shocks, understand how agents form their expectations, and develop methods to measure unobserved concepts such as sentiment, uncertainty and climate risk. His papers have been published in journals such as the Journal of Econometrics, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, Journal of Monetary Economics, and International Economic Review.
Larsen holds a Ph.D. in Economics from BI Norwegian Business School and a Master of Science in Economics from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Before his current roles, he was a Senior Researcher at Norges Bank, the central bank of Norway.