TY - JOUR AU - Fuchs,Victor R. AU - Krueger,Alan B. AU - Poterba,James M. TI - Why do Economists Disagree About Policy? JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 6151 PY - 1997 Y2 - August 1997 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w6151 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w6151.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Victor R. Fuchs 796 Cedro Way Stanford, CA 94305 Tel: 650/326-7639 Fax: 650/328-4163 E-Mail: vfuchs@stanford.edu Alan B. Krueger Industrial Relations Section Firestone Library Princeton University Princeton, NJ 08544 Tel: 609/258-4046 Fax: 609/258-2907 E-Mail: akrueger@princeton.edu James M. Poterba Department of Economics MIT, E52-350 50 Memorial Drive Cambridge, MA 02142-1347 Tel: 617/253-6673 Fax: 617/258-7804 E-Mail: poterba@nber.org AB - This paper reports the results of surveys of specialists in labor economics and public economics at 40 leading research universities in the United States. Respondents provided opinions of policy proposals; quantitative best estimates and 95% confidence intervals for economic parameters; answers to values questions regarding income redistribution, efficiency versus equity, and individual versus social responsibility; and their political party identification. We find considerable disagreement among economists about policy proposals. Their positions on policy are more closely related to their values than to their estimates of relevant economic parameters or to their political party identification. Average best estimates of the economic parameters agree well with the ranges summarized in surveys of relevant literature, but the individual best estimates are usually widely dispersed. Moreover, economists, like experts in many fields, appear more confident of their estimates than the substantial cross-respondent variation in estimates would warrant. Finally although the confidence intervals in general appear to be too narrow, respondents whose best estimates are farther from the median tend to give wider confidence intervals for those estimates. ER -