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The obvious answer is that policymakers want research that supports their personal and political preferences. Conversely, policymakers don’t want research that might pressure them to change their views.But with that central truth duly noted, situations often arise where policymakers have an overall goal, but the details of how to achieve that goal, or how to estimate costs and benefits of different approaches, needs to be filled in. Consider this comment from Jed Kolko, who just completed a two-year stint as Under Secretary of Economic Affairs at the US Department of Commerce. Kolko writes:I’ve spent the majority of my career as an economist in the private sector and at think tanks, producing research that I hoped would be useful for policymakers. But I recently completed two years in the Commerce Department, consuming research that could inform the work of the Biden-Harris Administration and the Commerce Department.
And having now seen this from the other side, more as a consumer than a producer of research, I can tell you that most academic research isn’t helpful for programmatic policymaking — and isn’t designed to be. I can, of course, only speak to the policy areas I worked on at Commerce, but I believe many policymakers would benefit enormously from research that addressed today’s most pressing policy problems.
But the structure of academia just isn’t set up to produce the kind of research many policymakers need. Instead, top academic journal editors and tenure committees reward research that pushes the boundaries of the discipline and makes new theoretical or empirical contributions. And most academic papers presume familiarity with the relevant academic literature, making it difficult for anyone outside of academia to make the best possible use of them.
The most useful research often came instead from regional Federal Reserve banks, non-partisan think-tanks, the corporate sector, and from academics who had the support, freedom, or job security to prioritize policy relevance. It generally fell into three categories:
- New measures of the economy
- Broad literature reviews
- Analyses that directly quantify or simulate policy decisions.
If you’re an economic researcher and you want to do work that is actually helpful for policymakers — and increases economists’ influence in government — aim for one of those three buckets.
The first item of Kolko’s list seems to me most directly relevant to work at Commerce. But the other two points reflect themes that come up in a symposium in the Spring 2024 Journal of Economic Perspectives (where I work as Managing Editor), on the subject of “How Research Informs Policy Analysis.” The four papers are:
Like all papers in JEP, these are freely available online, so I won’t attempt a detailed summary here. But as a quick overview:The staff of the CBO provide an overview of how it works, but the main focus is on specific questions in seven topic areas where the CBO would like to see additional research: credit and insurance, energy and the environment, health, labor, macroeconomics, national security, and taxes and transfers.Cass Sunstein focuses on OMB Circular A-4, which governs how the federal government does cost-benefit analysis, and which was thoroughly revised in 2023. As he describes it, the revised document includes “new directions on behavioral economics and nudging; on discount rates and effects on future generations; on distributional effects and how to account for them; and on benefits and costs that are hard or impossible to quantify. The revised document leaves numerous open questions, involving (for example) the valuation of human life, the valuation of morbidity effects, and the value of the lives of children.”Wendy Edelberg and Greg Feldberg led the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission authorized by Congress in 2009, in the aftermath of the worst events of the Great Recession, which relied in many ways on economic research. For example, they write:
Based on these experiences, we believe that the best way for a researcher to help government staff get up to speed is to be willing to explain not just research that was personally conducted, but more generally explain where the literature is broadly. Government staff need a framework to understand disagreements in the existing literature. A government report is not likely to incorporate the full worldview of a single expert, no matter how compelling. Staff is best-served when researchers can be honest brokers not just for their own research, but also in characterizing where there is and is not consensus and elucidating points of disagreement.
Moreover, for researchers to help staff pursue fruitful avenues for analysis, researchers should be willing to think outside their models. Of course, the real world is far more complicated than theoretical models and even empirical models. Recognizing that, staff is best served when researchers can brainstorm about the relevance of their analysis to the problem at hand. Sometimes, government staff need a number—even while appreciating the enormous uncertainty around that number.
Finally, Emily Oehlsen runs Open Philanthropy, an organization with a task that sounds a little like an undergraduate essay competition: If you had some money to give away, how would you decide–in some more-or-less objective way– where your donation would have the greatest positive effect? The answer relies in part on how you value gains in income and health, and also on the extent to which others may already be focused on a certain topic, or not, which will affect the gains from your particular contribution. As Oehlsen described, Open Philanthropy tries to spell out the reasons for its decision making, often based in available economic research,.One message from JEP these essays, along with the comments from Jed Kolko, is that the kinds of economic research that are rewarded with publication in top journals and tenure at colleges and universities is often disconnected from the advice that those in the detail-work of policy-making institutions would like to have available. There are various attempts to present research findings in more accessible ways, including my own efforts in editing the Journal of Economic Perspectives and in writing this blog. But ultimately, there’s no substitute for academic economists taking the time and energy, and developing the maturity of judgement, to put their work in the broader context of big questions and other existing research.More By This Author:The Jones Act: Consequences Of A Destructive Industrial Policy
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