Funds from this grant support a series of surveys, tests, and experiments by Princeton behavioral psychologist Eldar Shafir that examine scarcity and its implications for the social and behavioral sciences.  Findings to date suggest that how closely people’s behavior complies with standard economic models of rationality depends interestingly on the constraints they face when making decisions.  Shafir has found that those who are poor (or put into an experimental situation of scarcity) often act more like the rational “homo economicus” posited by normative economic theorists.  In contrast, those who are rich (or who are put into an experimental situation of plenty) often exhibit curious biases and behavioral anomalies that deviate from what standard economic models predict.  Abundance, Shafir’s research suggests, makes inconsistency and irrationality more affordable.  The findings stand in stark contrast to the widespread belief that those in poverty make poor economic decisions.  The truth may be exactly the reverse. This grant will fund the continuation and expansion of Shafir’s research over the next three years, allowing deeper investigation of what factors explain behavioral deviation from traditional economic models and the implication for the design and implementation of policy interventions. 

Behavioral economics should have many implications for government policy.  With this motivation, the Prime Minister’s Office in the U.K. established a Behavioral Insights Team (BIT) in 2010 to help bring insights from behavioral economics to the design and evaluation of government policy. The BIT’s successes in a wide variety of areas—from tax collection to energy efficiency to organ donation—have inspired other countries to launch similar initiatives, including Australia, the Netherlands, Israel, and the United States. The academics and government officials leading such efforts have much to gain by comparing notes with one another.  This grant funds a joint effort by David Halpern, head of the BIT in the U.K., and Max Bazerman, head of the Behavioral Insights Group (BIG) at Harvard, to organize a series of meetings, international conferences, and advanced courses that will bring together researchers from all over the globe to exchange the latest insights on the intersection of behavioral research and public policy.

Funds from this grant provide support for a project by WNYC to produce a series of radio segments focusing on health care policy and the economics of the health care system in New York as viewed through the lens of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).  Using a mix of personal stories, stakeholder interviews, data news, enterprise reporting, and in-depth conversations on the impact of the ACA, WNYC hopes to make the health care system more transparent to consumers.  The idea is to use this historic, confusing, and still controversial health care Act as a teaching moment for the public and to get at the underlying economics and health care policy that few understand well.  Additional focus will be on advances in medical science and methods that motivate behavior change for healthier living.   WNYC will produce 100 short news reports about the ACA, health care, and health care policy in the New York region for broadcast on programs like Morning Edition and All Things Considered and for follow-up discussion in segments on WNYC signature programs.  They will also produce two one-hour series each year that delve more deeply into topics such as how health care reform is affecting the city’s most vulnerable populations.  In addition, WNYC will launch a new, weekly podcast aimed at prompting healthier consumer behavior and choices, create interactive graphics and charts to make complex health and economic data more accessible, and hold two public events that will allow members of the public to engage with WNYC and policymakers, practitioners, and other experts.

This grant provides support to Bari Scott and SoundVision Productions for the continued production of their popular and ambitious multimedia radio series on energy, BURN: An Energy Journal.  Using grant funds, SoundVision will produce an in-depth one-hour special The Adaptors about energy innovators, entrepreneurs, and average citizens and their creative adaptations to our energy future; a series of at least 12 five- to eight-minute features on energy to air on Marketplace, The World, and All Things Considered; 52 eight- to 15-minute podcasts about energy, distributed via iTunes and Soundcloud; a multimedia website with enhanced information, blogs, maps, infographics, and video science explainers; and 50 to 100 two- to three-minute videos on Soundcloud that will also be posted to YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, and Tumblr.

This grant provides scholarship funds for an anticipated 59 master’s and 20 Ph.D. students to be recruited and enrolled over the next three years by the four institutional partners in the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership, a national network of four educational institutions that aim to increase the number of American Indians and Alaska Natives that obtain postgraduate degrees in STEM fields. The following is the expected breakdown of scholarships by campus:  $385,200 to the University of Alaska (Anchorage and Fairbanks); $712,500 to the University of Arizona; $620,000 to the Montana University system; and $353,338 to Purdue University.  Scholarships in the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership are administered and disbursed by the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering.

This grant provides support to Purdue University for its administrative, organizational, and infrastructure costs associated with the continued operation of the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership (SIGP), a national network of four universities and university systems that aim to increase the number of indigenous Americans and Alaska Natives that obtain postgraduate degrees in STEM fields.  Over the next three years the SIGP institutions—Purdue University, University of Arizona, the University of Alaska (Anchorage and Fairbanks), and the University of Montana system (University of Montana, Montana Tech, and Montana State University)—plan to recruit 59 talented American Indian or Native Alaska students into STEM master’s programs and 20 students into STEM Ph.D. programs.  Grant funds will support SIGP partner institutions as they engage in various administrative and infrastructure-building activities over the next three years, including community-building; collection, sharing, and analysis of data on student outcomes and programmatic effectiveness; and the launch of a new intercampus student exchange program.  Scholarship funds for students supported through the SIGP program are provided through a separate grant to the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering.

This grant provides three years of continuing support to the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering to administer scholarships for graduate students supported through the Foundation’s Minority Ph.D. program and the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership.  Funded activities include the timely execution of scholarship payments, accurate accounting of scholarship disbursements and balances, data collection on supported students, filing regular reports to the Foundation on scholarship disbursements, maintenance of the program’s website and associated forms, and the production of a series of webinars aimed at supported scholars.

In contrast with academics in other fields, economists and other social scientists have been slow to adopt new open source programming languages, instead sticking with expensive proprietary applications like Matlab and STATA when doing modeling or running complex analyses on data.  Because such programs cannot be used without a license, their popularity hamstrings reproducibility, hampers archiving, and hinders reuse of research that employs them. This grant funds efforts by Nobel Prize–winner Tom Sargent of New York University and computational economist John Stachurski of Australian National University to speed the adoption of Python—a compact, powerful open source programming and computation platform—among economists and social scientists.  Funds from this grant will bring Stachurski to NYU for a year to work with Sargent on expanding and promoting the usefulness of Python to economists everywhere.  They will develop free Python modules and teaching materials, publicize the capabilities of the new iPython notebook, give presentations, publish a textbook, and further develop the materials and resources freely available on their website, quant-econ.net.

The Center for Mathematical Talent (CMT) was established in 2010 at New York University's prestigious Courant Institute for Mathematics.  Its mission is to identify, motivate, and nurture those underserved and underrepresented students in New York City schools who could excel in mathematics.  This grant provides three years of continued support for the activities of the CMT, including partnering with other educational organizations to set up satellite programs for students unable or unwilling to travel to Manhattan, training public school teachers and others to run extracurricular programs like “math circles,” and developing educational materials, like math games, designed to present mathematics in ways that are challenging, fun, and engaging.  In addition, CMT plans over the next three years to double the numbers of students and instructors reached; diversify its sources of support; restructure its website to better serve its core audiences, and refine its data collection procedures so as to better measure program impact.

This grant funds a project led by Nicholas Bloom (Stanford University) and Steven Davis (University of Chicago) to examine the relationship between uncertainty in the business community and economic performance.  Partnering with the U.S. Census Bureau, Bloom and Davis will survey the nearly 45,000 U.S. business establishments in the 2016 Annual Survey of Manufacturing, asking respondents to provide forecasts about the coming year, including expected demand for products, prices, cost increases, employment, planned investment, and both industry- and economy-wide performance outcomes.  The resulting will be a powerful new dataset that will provide the first direct measure of uncertainty in the business community.  In a related effort, Bloom and Davis will partner with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta to survey a smaller sample of 1,000 businesses on a monthly basis, providing a complementary dataset that will be able to measure how business uncertainty changes over time and in response to new information.   Bloom and Davis plan to use these datasets to construct new measures of economic uncertainty and address a variety of questions, including the impact of uncertainty on business and aggregate economic performance; whether firm-level uncertainty reduces investment, hiring, and R&D; whether firm forecasts of business conditions and outcomes exhibit cognitive biases, and if so, whether these biases vary by firm age, size, performance, management experience, or external conditions.