Center for Data Analysis - The Heritage Foundation

About the Center

The Heritage Foundation created the Center for Data Analysis (CDA) in 1997 to provide the public policy community with state-of-the-art modeling, database products and research support. CDA’s team of experts provide databases that support strategic research, confidential reviews of legislation for Members of Congress and the Administration and supporting data and analysis for the media, in addition to peer reviewed analytical models that shed critically important insight on how social and economic systems are affected by policy change. The Center’s analysts subscribe to research standards that emphasize transparency and peer-review.

Analytical tools include:

Microsimulation model of federal income tax policy
Tax reform models: flat tax and sales tax models
Computable general equilibrium models for long-term policy analysis
Social Security Trust Fund and Rate of Return Models
The WEFA US Macroeconomic Model

The Center maintains scores of policy databases, including:

- Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey
IRS’s Statistics of Income
- Labor Department’s Consumer Expenditure Survey
- Education databases, including the NAEP series
- Datasets for analyzing federal crime policies
- A wide array of databases dealing with federal entitlement policies from Social Security to Medicare.