The Yale economist and 1981 Nobel laureate James Tobin is often quoted as saying, “The most important decisions a scholar makes are what problems to work on.”  Rather than trying to fill gaps in the literature, he continued, “The best economists have taken their subjects from the world around them.” On this view, perhaps academics seeking policy relevance need to reformulate and reframe the problems they work on with the real world more in mind?  That belief animates Tim Bresnahan, an economics professor emeritus at Stanford, and the team of other experts he leads.  Their goal is not just to inspire dozens more papers about the productivity (i.e., output per input) of the U.S. economy, but rather to inspire a new generation of researchers who study productivity questions in ways that are truly policy-relevant. Specifically, when legislation comes up that could enhance U.S. productivity or, for that matter, when legislation is proposed on nearly any topic, discussions in Congress that determine its fate depend far less on predicted consequences for the economy as a whole than on predicted consequences for the federal budget deficit.  The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is a strictly nonpartisan and highly respected group of technocrats charged with “scoring” proposed bills in terms of their likely effect on federal revenues and expenditures. In contrast, academic economists are almost always concerned with policy impacts on growth, labor, equity, and the economy in general rather than on the budget deficit in particular.  The importance of CBO scoring has, to date, been largely ignored.  In concert with other offices like the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), these ratings are generated according to Congressionally mandated guidelines that—for the sake of consistency and practicality—oversimplify many issues.  They rarely, for example, consider any time frame longer than ten years!  CBO is not prohibited from also conducting more sophisticated analyses, but is severely constrained by a lack of evidence, models, and time.  Hence their recent appeal to academic researchers for help on specific topics that was published in the influential Journal of Economic Perspectives. Three of the challenges called out in the CBO’s “request for research” are estimating net returns on R&D investments, on immigration practices, and on permitting reforms.  In each case, the significant costs and benefits of particular policies are potentially much longer term than Congress usually takes into account.  These topics also intersect well with Sloan priorities: the ROI on research and development is a critical question in the economics of science; immigrant contributions are a critical factor in regional economic development; and construction permitting is a critical problem in creating transportation infrastructure. Over the next two years, this grant will support 24 early-career investigators working in these three areas as “NBER Productivity Fellows.”  They will benefit from mentoring, community engagement, connections with government officials and datasets, as well as, in the case of graduate students, modest stipends to free them from other obligations.  The grant will also fund a workshop in Washington for researchers and practitioners working on U.S. productivity enhancements in policy-relevant, technocratic, nonpartisan, and real-world ways.