Sources of Evidence for Evidence-Based Policymaking: Evaluating Citations in the Economic Report of the President 2010-2025

• In Event: Executive Branch Politics and Lobbying

Abstract

Burkhauser and Burkhauser (2024, JPAM) show that Policy Research Institutes play an important role in creating evidence for evidence-based policymaking--most especially by their nurturing of academic-based economists who, as Members of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), advise Presidents and their staff on the economic problems they are called to solve via evidence-based policymaking. Using methods adapted from Ma and Bekkers (2024, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly) and Ma and Cheng (2024, Public Administration Review) we collect data on the source of all references in the Economic Report of the President (ERP) in the Obama, Trump and Biden Administrations.

We focus on three major questions: What are the major sources and academic reputation of those sources the CEA uses to support policies proposed by the President? Does this vary by year and President? and What are the most cited articles, their authors, and those authors' scholarly co-author networks?

Our initial findings using all 16 years of data (Obama 2010-2017, Trump 2018-2021, Biden 2022-2025) primarily focus on references to peer reviewed articles which make up approximately 75% of the 4,140 unique items referenced across these three Administrations. Focusing on the top 30 academic journals referenced in individual chapters, we find that they make up 51% of all peer-reviewed articles referenced and 49% of all unique articles referenced. The top 10 most cited journals are in order: AER (310), QJE (196), JEP (130), JPE (105), JPubE (93), REStat (77), Health Affairs (70), Brookings papers on economic activity (67), AEJ: Economic Policy (67), and Journal of Labor Economics (49). Of these only Health Affairs is a multidisciplinary journal. The remaining 20 include five more multidisciplinary journals: JPAM (40), Science (35), NAS Proceedings (34), JAMA (20), and Nature (20).

Measuring the consistency of these top sources using Spearman correlations shows that Obama–Trump share a correlation of 0.73, Trump–Biden 0.76, and Obama–Biden 0.49. When considering all cited sources (not just the top 30), the corresponding correlations are 0.66, 0.65, and 0.63, respectively. The top 20 articles most cited were published in the AER (4), QJE (4) and AEJ: Economic Policy (2) and once in each of 11 other journals.

Our preliminary results suggest a moderate degree of stability in journal rankings across presidencies, though not a particularly strong one—especially when comparing Obama and Biden. There is no obvious evidence of a clear partisan divide or alignment in the types of journals cited; rather, these correlations may reflect topic continuity, as certain policy concerns (e.g., health, labor, macro economics) carry over from one administration to the next, even as individual reference patterns shift slightly with each President’s policy priorities. 

Finally, we analyzed the co-author networks of the peer reviewed articles that the CEA reference in the ERP to understand the social dynamics behind the ERP's evidence base. Overall all years we find various distinct intellectual camps of which Alan Kruger, Larry Katz, and David Autor are among the most important brokers between these camps. But these vary across Administrations.

Authors

• Richard V. Burkhauser, The University of Texas at Austin
  Presenting Author

• Ji Ma, The University of Texas at Austin
  Non-Presenting Co-Author