For decades, questions have been raised about whether the postdoctoral system in the United States is achieving its goals. The United States currently supports more than 60,000 postdocs spread about the sciences, engineering, and medicine. Overall, less than a third move on to tenure-track positions. Biomedicine stands out both for the scale of its reliance on postdocs and for the limited number of faculty openings for them to fill. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) funds almost half of all postdoctoral fellowships, and it spends over $1.6 billion per year doing so. NIH has begun to discuss alternative funding schemes for young researchers. In other countries, for example, recent PhDs routinely find long-term, respectable, and satisfying work as “staff scientists.” How could something like that work here? What would it cost? Whether to fund more postdocs or staff scientists, that is the question. And it is a hard one requiring insights from labor economics, public finance, the science of science funding, experimental economics, etc. With Sloan support, economists Donna Ginther (Kansas) and Bruce Weinberg (Ohio State) will lead research on whether postdocs and staff scientists currently function as complements or substitutes in the production of research output. They will make use of administrative data about grant spending compiled by the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science (IRIS), a resource that Weinberg helped launch with Sloan funding. They will also use text analysis to study author contribution statements and postings for biomedical job openings in industry. This will allow comparisons of how the roles of staff scientists and postdocs progress generally and, in particular, whether postdoctoral training does provide benefits for those who end up in industry and for their employers. Results will be incorporated into the “Science of Science Funding” project at NBER, which Sloan also supports.