Using Quantized Low Rank Adaptation and Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning, we fine-tuned Meta AI’s LLaMA-2-7B large language model as a research assistant in the field of economics for three different types of tasks: title generation, abstract classification, and question and answer. The model was fine-tuned on economics paper abstracts and syntheticically created question-answer dialogues based on the abstracts. For the title generation, the results of the experiment demonstrated that LLaMA-2-Econ (the fine-tuned model) surpassed the base model (7B and 13B) with few shot learning, and comparable models of similar size like Mistral-7B and Bloom-7B in the BLEU and ROUGE metrics. For abstract categorization, LLaMA-2-Econ outperformed different machine and deep learning algorithms in addition to state-of-the-art models like GPT 3.5 and GPT 4 with both single and representative few shot learning. We tested the fine-tuned Q&A model by comparing its output with the base LLaMA-2-7B-chat with a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline with semantic search and dense vector indexing, and found that LLaMA-2 performed on a par with the base model with RAG.