Federal court records document over 30 million personal bankruptcy cases during the century since the U.S. passed its first permanent bankruptcy law in 1898. Storing and maintaining these records is expensive, however-the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts has been spending $2 million per year to keep about a million cubic feet of these paper records stored in boxes at Federal Records Centers in a dozen different regions-and efforts were recently announced to cut costs, possibly by disposing of all these records. Plans to discard this rich historical record naturally set off alarms among scholars of all sorts, from those studying gender and racial disparities, to those interested in business cycles. Researchers began to write about compelling projects that could only be completed using these bankruptcy records. Funds from this grant will support efforts by American University Professor Mary Hansen to work with the National Archive and Records Administration to create a research database from a statistically representative sample of these bankruptcy records, digitally preserving the data they contain for future use by scholars.

In July 2010, Carnegie Mellon professor Chester Spatt hosted a Foundation-supported conference on the industrial organization of credit ratings agencies - the industry responsible for evaluating the creditworthiness of financial instruments and products. The 80 conference participants composed a diverse crop of researchers, including economists, industry practitioners, government officials, and international experts. In addition to presentations on a number of important topics, including litigation risk, competition among rating firms, and regulatory challenges associated with securitization, the conference hosted a session on next steps, where attendees voiced enthusiasm for forming a research network, continuing annual conferences, compiling shared data, and increasing interaction with policymakers. Funds from this grant will support a project by Professor Spatt to develop just such an ongoing research network. Additional funds provide continued support for Professor Spatt's own work on developing sophisticated game theoretic models of the credit rating process, with an emphasis on potential biases introduced into the ratings process by the way firms purchase ratings sequentially and then decide which ratings to publish.

This grant to Susan Houseman of the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research supports ongoing efforts to study ways to improve the quality of federal statistics related to the effects of globalization and international trade flows on the U.S. economy and work with officials at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of economic analysis to develop practical strategies to correct biases or methodological flaws in current data collection practices. Funds from this grant will support the commissioning of several papers on federal data collection methodologies; an academic conference to be attended by economists, researchers, policymakers, and federal officials; a published volume of papers; and the development of concrete plans for improving how we understand and measure the effects of globalization on the U.S. economy.

Among the provisions contained in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act is a requirement that regulators figure out which institutions contribute the most to systemic risk so that these companies can be supervised more closely. Making such a determination requires the creation of a sophisticated, empirically-tested, theoretically-informed model of how firm qualities contribute to systemic risk. Funds from this grant support the ongoing efforts of NYU Stern School Business Professor and Nobel Laureate Rob Engle to develop such a model, allowing a comprehensive ranking of firms that pose the most danger to the global economy. Engle's work subjects firms to a form of stress test, modeling how easily firms could meet regulatory requirements in the event of a sudden drop in asset prices similar to the one that roiled markets in the fall of 2008. Grant funds will allow for the refinement of Professor Engle's model, and for expansion of his rankings to include not just U.S. firms, but international firms as well.

Funds from this grant support a project by Resources for the Future (RFF) to assess the risks associated with increased shale gas development in the United States as viewed by both experts and the public. Primary focus will be on water scarcity and water, air, and soil quality issues associated with surface operations at well sites, vertical well drilling, horizontal drilling, deep hydraulic fracturing, and wastewater disposal. Expert views will be assembled from existing literature, recent government analyses, and interviews with selected experts. Public views will be determined by means of interviews with up to 100 people, four focus groups, and a survey of 1,500 randomly selected adults that will focus on public willingness to pay to reduce risks from shale gas development. Participants in the interviews, focus groups, and surveys will be drawn from residents in the western region of the United States, including Texas, where oil and gas production has a long history, and from the six-state eastern region of the Marcellus shale formation, where oil and gas production had not occurred for many years until recently and where shale gas production could be extensive in the near future. Subsequent to this research, RFF will identify, describe, and analyze the drivers of environmental risks associated with shale gas production and the policy levers potentially available to reduce these risks. RFF will describe and analyze current and prospective regulation and legislation at the national, river basin commission, and state levels, with some attention to the local level. Finally, RFF will put all of this together to develop recommendations for improvements in regulation and legislation.

In a poll conducted by Science in 2011, scientists across disciplines were asked, "Where do you archive most of the data generated in your lab or for your research?" More than 50% responded "in our lab." While fine for short-term research needs, this "data under the desk" scenario poses real risks for the long-term utility and reproducibility of research. One way of improving this situation and getting more data under safer cover is to develop data management solutions that directly address the immediate needs of researchers while allowing the delegation of data curation functions like preservation and archiving. This grant supports a focused, iterative development process by DuraSpace to design, build, and release such a system.

Access to some datasets is justifiably restricted for legal, ethical, or business reasons. The existence of such datasets presents an opportunity for the smart application of technology that permits aggregate statistical or computational research on the data without violating the constraints that prevent full access. This grant to researcher Beth Plale at Indiana University, supports a collaborative project with the Hathi Trust, holder of over 8.5 million digitized print works, to address the immense technical and theoretical issues involved in designing digital methods for mining data from in-copyright materials that respect current legal restrictions governing access to such works. Plale's team will develop a secure computing environment that will enable researchers to bring their own algorithms and tools to bear on Hathi's full?text digitized corpus, while at the same time limiting the ability of that software (or researchers) to access the work in a way that runs afoul of copyright law.