The impact of private research on public policy

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To what extent, and through what mechanisms, does academic research affect the development of public policy in the United States? Policymakers expend enormous amounts of effort to justify the benefits of proposed policies; these documents, called cost-benefit analysis (CBA), can sprawl to several hundred pages for particularly complex issues. Within CBA, policymakers often cite academic work to justify changing how the government enforces laws.  To assess the scope of academic influence over policymaking I assemble a novel dataset of all academic citations within Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) documents from 1994 - 2020. First, I find no effect of partisan differences in academic citations or in oversight.  Second, changes in citations between proposed and final rules are associated with more restrictive legal language.  Finally, I provide evidence that changes in citations are associated with changes in legally operative text of final rules. 

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Teaming up or Flying Solo