Blog by Jed Kolko: “…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 pandemic and its aftermath brought an urgent need for data at higher frequency, with greater geographic and sectoral detail, and about ways the economy suddenly changed. Some of the most useful research contributions during that period were new data and measures of the economy: they were valuable as ingredients rather than as recipes or finished meals. Here are some examples:
- An analysis of which jobs could be done remotely. This was published in April 2020, near the start of the pandemic, and inspired much of the early understanding of the prevalence and inequities of remote work.
- An estimate of how much the weather affects monthly employment changes. This is increasingly important for separating underlying economic trends from short-term swings from unseasonable or extreme weather.
- A measure of supply chain conditions. This helped quantify the challenges of getting goods into the US and to their customers during the pandemic.
- Job postings data from Indeed (where I worked as chief economist prior to my government service) showed hiring needs more quickly and in more geographic and occupational detail than official government statistics.
- Market-rent data from Zillow. This provided a useful leading indicator of the housing component of official inflation measures…(More)”.
