This grant supports research by atmospheric chemist Allen Goldstein and environmental engineer William Nazaroff to examine the processes controlling abundance, sources, and fates of organic chemicals indoors. The work will focus on the roles of human occupants, emissions from the building and its contents, and the intrusion of outdoor pollutants as agents influencing indoor air chemistry. In a series of experiments, Goldstein and Nazaroff will characterize organic compound composition of the air in residential spaces, cataloging the relative abundance of volatile (VOC), intermediate volatile (IVOC), and semivolatile (SVOC) organic compounds in both the gas and particle phases, and to compare this composition with outdoor air. They will then analyze how organic compound composition changes across various dimensions: by time, by location inside the residence, and by human occupancy. Their methods will enable them to apportion indoor air organics into major source categories: building fabric and contents, occupants and activities, and outdoor air, with the ultimate objective of understanding the role of emissions influencing indoor air chemistry. This work will advance the state of knowledge regarding the contributions of humans, human activities, surface interactions, and oxidation processes influencing indoor air composition in residences. This new knowledge will be shared through peer-reviewed publications and presentations at conferences and meetings. At least three students will be trained.

This grant funds research by University of Toronto chemist Jonathan Abbatt, who is trying to forge better kinetic and mechanistic understandings of multiphase chemistry occurring indoors. Abbatt’s work focuses on the oxidation kinetics in both the condensed-phase and volatile products and the effects of oxidation on the gas-aerosol-surface partitioning of semivolatile species. Grant funds will allow Abbatt to use state-of-the-art mass spectrometric techniques in the laboratory to address the multiphase chemistry of a range of indoor surface materials. Abbatt will document what gas-phase and condensed-phase products arise from ozonolysis of the components of skin and cooking oils, characterize the oxidation kinetics and mechanisms of indoor combustion materials, such as cigarette and cannabis smoke, determine the fate of HOCl, an important oxidant released by bleach washing, and investigate how surface oxidation affects the partitioning of surface-sorbed species. Abbatt and his team will generate important new insights into indoor chemistry. This new knowledge will be shared through peer-reviewed publications and presentations at conferences and meetings. At least two postdoctoral researchers and three students will be trained.

While some evidence exists about the types of job conditions that could encourage older workers to remain in the labor force, it is unknown whether and the extent to which those conditions are or could be available in the labor market. Surveys of older workers, for instance, regularly report high demand for workplace flexibility—specifically hours flexibility—as well as other conditions. Yet, employee preferences for job conditions like these are only half of the labor market equation. Substantially less research has been done on the employer side of the equation to understand firm-level incentives and capabilities. This grant funds a project by Jeffrey Wenger and David Powell at the RAND Corporation, in collaboration with a team at the Indeed Hiring Lab that will survey human resource (HR) professionals, hiring managers, and employers to collect information about firms’ working conditions, the variation in those working conditions across workers in the same firm, and the varying on-the-job amenities from which workers can select. In addition to collecting and analyzing these data, the team will construct a set of vignettes that display the tradeoffs between job conditions and wages that firms are capable of and willing to make. This project will produce some of the first evidence about firm-level behavior regarding the willingness of employers to accommodate older workers with specific work conditions.

This grant to the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME) covers expected costs and obligations associated with three years of continued operation of the University Centers of Exemplary Mentoring (UCEMs) at Cornell University, Georgia Institute of Technology, and the Pennsylvania State University. UCEMs are the primary funding model for the Sloan Foundation’s Minority Ph.D. (MPHD) program and NACME provides administrative and fiscal support for management of all Sloan funding for UCEMs. Funds granted to each UCEM are used primarily for $40,000 scholarships for underrepresented minority doctoral students in STEM fields. Across the three UCEMs, an estimated 61 students will receive such scholarships over the next three years, with an estimated 21 “matching” students receiving additional support from UCEM host institutions. All these students will be designated as Sloan Scholars and become eligible for other Sloan-supported opportunities and services. Additional grant funds support programmatic expenses associated with the recruitment, retention, and mentoring of these students; activities to promote their successful completion of graduate study; efforts to institutionalize UCEM priorities, policies, and practices by the conclusion of the three-year grant period; and a series of interrelated activities by NACME to support the UCEM community.

The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is a global network of economic researchers who share a dedication to promoting the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in economics as a way of generating real and reliable solutions to important social problems. J-PAL’s 170 affiliated researchers have conducted more than 800 high-quality RCTs since its founding on a wide range of issues including poverty, crime, discrimination, education, and voting behavior. The network has also trained some 1,500 researchers on how to effectively design and implement randomized controlled trials and has launched and promoted an RCT registry now housed at the American Economic Association.   This grant supports a new initiative by J-PAL Global, called Innovations in Data and Experiments (IDEA), which aims to facilitate and improve researcher access to and use of administrative data. J-PAL Global will encourage data holders to work with researchers, provide technical, legal, and practical guidance to researchers who want to work with administrative data, and help avoid duplicate efforts to obtain, clean, and document administrative datasets. Grant funds will support IDEA’s core technical staff, two pilot projects in the United States, and the creation of several handbooks and workshops on using administrative data in economic experiments.

While there has been a great deal of debate over the impact of outsourcing on workers and incomes, empirical research on the prevalence of these arrangements has been limited due to the lack of large-scale microdata. This grant funds a project by economists Nicholas Bloom of Stanford, Steven Davis of the University of Chicago’s Booth Business School, Raffaella Sadun of the Harvard Business School, and John Van Reenen of MIT to address this gap through designing and fielding the first large-scale microsurvey of firms’ outsourcing activities. Data will be collected by adding new outsourcing-related questions to the 2020 Management and Organizations Practices Survey (MOPS), a mandatory survey on a stratified sample of 50,000 U.S. manufacturing establishments. The research team will match these new outsourcing data with a wide variety of other data, including the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) matched employer?employee data, the Census of Manufacturing, the Longitudinal Firm Trade Transaction Database, and MOPS management data. These linkages will enable researchers to examine a host of important but currently difficult-to-examine issues, including the causes and consequences of outsourcing and its impacts on earnings, employment levels, and volatility.