Public sector and private sector employees experience what appear to be distinctly different routes from full-time employment to full-time retirement. This grant funds research by North Carolina State University’s Robert Clark and Harvard’s Joseph Newhouse that will compare the retirement paths of public and private workers and assess how working conditions, retirement benefits, and government regulations impact the age of retirement and the likelihood of working after retirement. Clark and Newhouse will commission 16 research studies that will examine the impact of pensions, health policies, employment rules, and government programs and regulations on the timing of when older workers leave their jobs, their potential for working after retirement, and how these differ for public and private sector employees. The research will be carried out in two waves, with eight projects and a capstone research conference for each wave.?

Many economists predict that the global economy is entering a sustained period of historically low productivity and real wage growth. This grant funds work by economists John Shoven and Sita Slavov that will analyze the implications of working longer and strategies for saving for retirement in a such a low-growth, low-return, low real-wage-growth environment. How do optimal retirement and savings strategies change as the prospects of robust economic growth dim? This research will include two projects related to the broader theme of retirement-focused behaviors in a slow growth economy. The first will focus on the measuring the benefits accruing to working longer in a low-return environment. Using data taken from the influential Health and Retirement Study (HRS), Shoven and Slavov they will compute the rate of return to working longer for HRS respondents between ages 50 and 62 using a life cycle model that assumes individuals face borrowing constraints and that incorporates the actuarial benefit adjustments they receive when they delay Social Security The second project will explore in depth the impact of low wage growth and low asset returns in a slow growth economy. Shoven and Slavov will work through the theoretical implications of optimal savings and working decisions. Because savings depresses current standards of living in exchange for future benefits, the attractiveness of saving drops as asset returns slow. Likewise, the attractiveness of future work dips as wage growth slows. Shoven and Slavov will work out how these differing factors interact under standard economic modeling assumptions, paying special attention to the implications for working longer to raise or maintain living standards. The two projects form interesting and compelling research agenda that has real-life consequences for millions of Americans.

The annual Stanford Institute Economic Research (SIEPR) Working Longer Conferences allow researchers working at the intersection of aging and work to present their findings, compare approaches, imagine new projects, and get constructive feedback from fellow researchers. Over the past four years, more than 90 different scholars have presented high-quality research as authors, co-authors, or discussants, and each conference has averaged 60 to 70 attendees. The conferences also provide the opportunity for Sloan to identify new potential grantees and to introduce and welcome junior scholars to the community of working longer researchers. This grant provides funds to Stanford University to continue organizing, administering, and hosting the SIEPR Working Longer conferences for an additional three years.

Funds from this grant continue support for the production of Planet Money, National Public Radio’s award-winning, signature foray into exploring the changing American economy via in-depth stories that examine key economic issues for a general audience in an accurate, accessible, and engaging way. Grant funds support production of the twice-weekly Planet Money podcast, shorter segments that air on NPR’s popular Morning Edition and All Things Considered, multipart series to explore complex subjects at greater depth, and experiments in  "participatory journalism" like "Planet Money Bought Some Oil," where Planet Money journalists directly participate in specific industries to help illuminate their processes. Planned activities over the two-year grant period include  a 10-part series on the history of the U.S. economy over the past 200 years that will examine subjects such as central banking, national debt, and the modern, multinational corporation; and new participatory journalism projects such as exploring the business of commercial space satellites.

This grant provides funds to the popular television history series American Experience for the production of four new shows for a total of eight hours of new, prime time science programming over the next two years. Supported shows include one two-hour series on the history of the eugenics movement (“Eugenics on Trial”) and one four-hour series about the decade-long U.S. effort to reach the moon (“Chasing the Moon”). The other two shows include a one-hour documentary about Alfred Loomis and the team of scientists who helped develop radar and the atomic bomb during World War II (“Tuxedo Park”), and a one-hour special  about advances in the science of deep sea exploration and rescue (“SeaLab”).

This grant continues support for the PBS NewsHour’s regular weekly broadcast of Making Sen$e with Paul Solman, a series that explains business and economic issues clearly and engagingly to a general audience both on air and online. Grant funds support the production of 52 Making Sen$e broadcast video reports each year on major issues facing the American and global economy. Additional funds support the production of hundreds of original pieces of web content, including long-form think pieces written by economists or based on Paul Solman's interviews with economists. The NewsHour also has a formalized partnership with NBER to feature its economists, and the reach of its segments is magnified by dissemination on Extra, the NewsHour’s educational website, on PBS Teachers, and on partner sites such as the Council for Economic Education’s econedlink.org. Planned segments over the grant period include many topics that address the economic concerns of everyday Americans. Questions to be investigated include, among others: What's going to happen if Obamacare is repealed? What rate of economic growth is plausible? Why has there been a reversal of mortality for middle-aged white men? Can jobs in the coal industry come back?

The grant continues support for for the Relativity Series, a Foundation partnership with LA Theatre Works (LATW) to produce, broadcast, and disseminate audio versions of science- or technology-themed plays. Relativity now totals 32 science plays, of which 20 have been commissioned, developed, and/or produced by the Sloan Theater program. Productions are high-quality and feature leading actors, giving recorded plays a life well after their theatrical runs. They are broadcast on over 50 public radio stations in the U.S., on Radio Beijing in China, and on radio in many English-speaking nations. Productions are also distributed via streaming and downloading on the Internet, through educational outreach to over 3,000 teachers and 13,000 community libraries, and through distribution partners such as iTunes, Audible, Amazon, and Overdrive. Grant funds will enable L.A. Theatre Works to produce and distribute audio version of four new science-themed plays over the next two years. Additional funds support a variety of initiatives to expand the reach and impact of the Relativity catalog, including a podcast series; a new website; an educational app; and print, online, and social media outreach.

To properly understand and model the changing US electricity distribution grid, economists and other social scientists need in-depth training on the technological and engineering complexities of the electricity distribution system. This grant provides funding to the Colorado School of Mines (CSM) to organize and host a week-long summer school for early-career economists and other social scientists designed to provide such training. Each week-long summer school, to be held twice each summer over the course of two summers, would include tailored classroom training; engagement and lectures by senior utility, government, and nongovernmental experts; and an experiential component through tutorials held at NREL’s Energy Systems Integration Facility. Participating expert instructors include those in distribution systems planning (Doug Arent and Michael Coddington), grid integration (Barbara O’Neill), and power systems engineering (Benjamin Kroposki). Summer school participants—which include advanced graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty—will be broadly recruited from professional societies, such as the Association of Environmental and Resource Economics and the United States Association of Energy Economics, and from with universities that have doctoral programs with a strong focus in energy economics.

This grant funds work by power systems expert Michael Caramanis to develop a sophisticated, granular framework for pricing electricity at different points on the electricity distribution grid, especially for those systems that feature increased levels of load varying distributed energy resources like consumer solar panels. Decades ago, the introduction of locational marginal prices (LMPs) helped to match generation and consumption in the bulk power system. Caramanis plans to extend this framework and take on the more technically complex challenge of developing distribution network locational marginal prices (DLMP) for different nodes in the electricity distribution grid. After developing algorithms to model DLMP for electricity distribution, Caramais will work in close collaboration with at least two utilities to test his model on actual distribution system networks. The proposed work will help address a critical gap in the academic literature and could lead to improved regulatory policies regarding distribution network pricing.

This grant funds a project led by Meghan Busse (Northwestern), Christopher Knittel (MIT), and Kate Whitefoot (Carnegie Mellon University) to spur research on energy consumption in the transportation sector by fielding an open call for papers on the topic and providing funding and support to the best submissions. Areas of interest include changing patterns of personal vehicle demand, vehicle electrification, the economics of changing fuels for commercial and heavy-duty vehicles, and the rise of vehicle automation and ride-sharing.  The group will widely distribute an open call for papers, evaluate submissions, select eight papers to receive funding, organize an initial working session to discuss methodology and preliminary research approaches, and hold a final conference to share and disseminate results. Papers will be published as NBER working papers and then submitted to top economics journals.