Think tanks: who's hot and who's not: the latest TIE study comparing economic think tank visibility in the media. The hot economists and hot topics.

• Author: Trimbath, Susanne

Until about 1970, most Americans thought that the President arrived at the White House by summing up all of the interests represented by the winning party's platform. The ideological divide between Democrats and Republicans in the House reached an all time low around the same time. Thirty years later, with presidential candidates less beholden to their parties and the differences between the parties growing larger on many issues, the world has become increasingly complicated. The more complicated events become, the greater is the need for interpretation along the way to help make sense of what is happening. Only politics and religion could rank ahead of economics in terms of complexity. That's where the economic experts at the think tanks come in: they offer a story to explain the economic data.

A study by Nicolas Ruble (The International Economy, September/October 2000) evaluated the press visibility of twelve economic policy think tanks and 171 of their scholars from July 1997 through June 1999. The results attracted so much attention that the survey was subsequently extended by Adam Posen using highly compatible methodology to cover sixteen think tanks and 276 economists through June 2002 (TIE, Fall 2002).

In the 2000 results, the top three think tanks were Brookings Institution, the Institute for International Economics, and the American Enterprise Institute. The top three individual economists were Fred Bergsten of the Institute for International Economics plus Robert Litan and Nicholas Lardy of Brookings. In the 2002 results, Brookings, the Institute for International Economics, and the American Enterprise Institute once again took the top three places. Among the individual economists, Bergsten and Litan remained first and second respectively, but Mr. Lardy dropped to fifth place. The number three position over the longer survey belonged to Robert Reischauer who held positions at both Brookings and the Urban Institute during that time. (1)

A ranking of top economists serves several functions. First, it explicitly identifies high-quality economists for think tanks seeking to improve their relative ranking. Think tanks are an aggregation of individual economists: any institution may increase its relative ranking by courting more productive staff members or fellows from higher-ranked institutions, provided that they know who to seek. Second, the ranking can be used by graduating students to measure the "reputational capital" of prospective employers. New Ph.D.s may decide to work for a think tank that offers them more visibility than they might otherwise receive as a university professor. Finally, a ranking of top economists provides information to the public about the experts whose research policymakers are most likely to use.

We now extend the survey once again to cover more than eight years, from January 1, 1997, through March 30, 2005. The basic methodology remains unchanged. (2) In addition to extending the time frame, this study adds the Los Angeles Times to the publication mix and brings back California's Milken Institute among the think tanks. (3) Los Angeles is the second largest city in the United States and California is the sixth largest economy in the world. The Los Angeles Times contributes 15 percent of the citations in this study, a share that would rank it behind only the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal in the earlier study.

Since most news databases are available electronically at least beginning in January 1997, there seemed no strong argument to keep the mid-year start date. Also, allocating the data across months (rather than years) allows the impact of events on the rankings to be examined. We performed all the searches using the same databases and wording as in 2002. We reviewed each article for content rather than just recording the number of "hits" for each search. This means we did not count mentions of appointments, attendance at dinner parties, or other mentions unrelated to the scholar's research. Several times we found hits in articles completely unrelated to the scholar, especially in the case of scholars with names like Robert Lawrence (two "first names") or Paul London (how many people in London are named Paul?). Those citations were not counted in our study.

Despite the several changes, there are few dramatic differences in the rankings of the think tanks from the 2002 study. Among the top nine, none move more than one position in either direction. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Progressive Policy Institute, and the Hudson Institute move up substantially; the National Center for Policy Analysis and the Economic Strategy Institute, along with the Council on Foreign Relations, move down quite a bit. The inclusion of the Los Angeles Times most benefited the Milken Institute, although the impact can't be measured with certainty because there was significant turnover during the study. The addition of Ross DeVol and Bill Frey in the late 1990s (ranked in the Top 30, see Table) boosted the citation count, but Frey moved his primary affiliation to Brookings in 2002 and with that (plus the 2004 departure of Joel Kotkin, ranked in the Top 100), the Milken Institute's citation count dropped from a peak of 85 in 2001 to only sixteen last year.

Since we extended the survey back to the beginning of 1997, we can now present ranking comparisons over the last three calendar years using our full data set. Although Brookings continues to rank first overall, we see that they slipped behind the Institute for International Economics in 2004. The American Enterprise Institute has been consistently ranked third, while the Cato Institute and Urban Institute are "most improved" since 2002, moving up ten and four places respectively. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is the only think tank in the group to have slid back significantly from their 2002 position.

A relative newcomer among the think tanks is moving to the forefront since its founding in late 2001: the Center for Global Development. Though not strictly speaking an "economics" think tank, the center includes five scholars who appear in the current study either because they are holding joint appointments with ranked think tanks (for example, Kimberly Ann Elliott with the Institute for International Economics) or because they moved from a ranked think tank to the Center for Global Development (such as Jean Olson Lanjouw from Brookings). Of course, the Center for Global Development cannot be ranked over the full period of the study. However, looking only at the full years 2002 through 2004, it would have ranked at least fourteenth for citations received in each year of their existence. (4)

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE LATELY?

The number of academic citations an economist receives during a given year is considered to be a measure of the flow of citations from a stock of past articles; as such it is viewed as a proxy for the value of the human capital an individual has accumulated. For press citations, the measure is much more current. Newspapers ask, "What have you done lately?" and are less likely to be concerned about the stock of past articles. In this sense, press citations are more apt to uncover fresh, exciting, and interesting economic ideas.

Furthermore, press citations are not controlled by academics who may have a vested interest in the reputation of a particular school or department and therefore support a network of authors who cite each other's publications relatively frequently, as has been suggested. (In fact, an additional academic citation has been shown to add more to a professor's salary than the publication of an additional article or book.) For newspapers and magazines, on the other hand, their business is to sell more copies.

One way to do this is through the use of "celebrities," in this case, the best-known economists. Drawing on studies on the use of celebrities in advertising, it is possible that celebrity economists serve to call attention to a publication. Using a celebrity...