The Center for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) is the lead developer of the "Handle System," an open-source, publicly licensed, and popular technology specification for identifying and tracking digital objects. Used by over a thousand different organizations in more than 50 countries, the system deploys identifiers called "handles," that can be used to identify and track everything from scholarly publications to datasets to songs to movies. Unlike URLs, which specify the location where a particular instance of a set of digital information can be found, handles are independent of where the digital object is hosted, allowing users of system to locate a digital object wherever it may be located. Funds from this grant support the continued development and expansion of the Handle System, with a focus on expanding the system so that it works seamlessly across multiple digital object registries disparate data types not previously considered and to demonstrate the system's effectiveness through the development of use cases.

What should financial regulators do about systemic risk? Ideally, many would like to describe, track, and aggregate the implications of nearly every significant financial contract around the world. Though daunting in scope, doing so would be technically quite feasible. The coordination necessary to make such a system work would be much more challenging than building it. Indeed, at smaller scales, professional risk managers already describe, track, and aggregate contract implications every day. Their data systems, however, are ad hoc and proprietary. Both the inputs and outputs of their risk calculations may be totally incomparable across different organizations-or even within the same institution. What's needed is a way to standardize the characterization of financial contracts. An international team led by the Stevens Institute of Technology is already working on the open-source software needed. They claim that the cash flow implications of nearly any financial agreement can be accurately approximated using just 30 standardized "contract types." Like Lego blocks, these can fit together to model quite complicated and comprehensive structures. Their widespread use would give both regulators and financial institutions the ability to "put all the pieces together" and model financial risk in ways that are impossible now. This grant provides funds to support the development and deployment of a pilot open-source "contract typing" software system with the ability to accurately model the cash flow implications of a wide range of financial contracts. Funds will support software development, testing, refinement, infrastructure, and outreach in an attempt to demonstrate the feasibility of such a software system.

Funds from this grant support a series of data-oriented improvements to the influential Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (BPEA) that will make its papers as replicable, interactive, and technologically empowered as those at the forefront of innovation in other fields. Planned improvements include adding the capacity to include new data as they arrive, thus keeping the analyses and conclusions in a paper up-to-date for years after publication. Also planned are upgrades that will enable papers to come with embedded code and interactive data visualizations that allow readers to test alternative regression specifications, change parameter settings, or adjust the time frame analyzed, all within the paper. Funds would primarily support the requisite technical updates to the BPEA website, with additional monies for user support and for incentive funds for authors who commit to making periodic updates to their data and findings.