Researchers and policymakers want to better understand the dynamics of the Care Economy, but reliable, timely, and comprehensive statistics on caregivers are severely lacking. Misty Heggeness, Professor and Co-Director of the Kansas Population Center at the University of Kansas, therefore proposes to create The Care Board, a user-friendly online dashboard containing high-quality statistics about the U.S. Care Economy. The idea is to cover all activities, paid or unpaid, that contribute to the development of human capital, including the maintenance of another human being’s ability to thrive. Measuring such work is a challenge for many reasons, not least because many caregivers hold multiple jobs. The Care Board will use standard definitions from sociology and economics that account for these nuances. To the extent possible, data will be disaggregated by age, gender, parental status, race, ethnicity, educational attainment, poverty status, income, geographic area, and household configuration. To begin, Heggeness’ team will publish statistics on care workers based on traditional publicly available data sources, such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the American Time Use Survey, and the Current Population Survey. Some examples include the number of hours and percent of individuals who spend time engaging in (paid or unpaid) care work as a primary, secondary, or supervisory activity; or the number of families receiving benefits from WIC. The indicators will be improved over time using state-of-the-art methods to link administrative records with traditional survey microdata that Heggeness helped develop as a research economist at the Census Bureau. The Care Board will also feature data on federal and local policies like parental leave that affect caregivers’ ability to work for pay. With over a dozen years of experience in the federal statistical system, Heggeness is prepared to meet these statistical, methodological, and organizational challenges. She also plans to disseminate Care Board data through conference presentations, seminars, and user trainings. Encouragingly, top leadership at the Census Bureau have taken an active interest in this pilot. If all goes well, it could help launch a major effort by the federal statistical system to begin officially measuring how caregivers underpin U.S. economic progress.

The Sloan Foundation and other science funders naturally care about making basic research more productive, or, in other words, increasing the value of scholarly outputs per grant dollar we spend. Among the many factors influencing that ratio, researchers’ ability to plan, organize, and lead projects could be potentially important. Management training, after all, demonstrably enhances team performance in industries that range from manufacturing to healthcare. But beyond anecdotes, no one knows much about how academics run their laboratories. This is particularly striking in comparison to other sectors of the economy whose management practices have been extensively studied and improved. Economist Daniela Scur is therefore launching the first large-scale and methodologically sophisticated survey of organizational practices in academic research. She brings years of practical experience that includes running parts of the vaunted World Management Survey. Her team has already begun testing questions and protocols that explore ethics, mentoring, inclusiveness, climate, and other factors of concern in academic settings. Biomedical research laboratories are the first target because their operations are relatively homogenous, identifiable, team-oriented, and expensive. Eventually the plan is to survey 2500 from around the country. To date, they have already made adjustments to their survey instruments and plans based on a pilot project at the Harvard Medical School. Even there, the preliminary findings are tantalizing. Compared with those actually running or working in their labs, the PIs contacted were often unaware of what management practices were in place and overestimated their quality in any case. The full survey will adhere to, and benefit from, standards developed by the World Management Survey. In addition to documenting current practices, the survey results will be used to design and test interventions for teaching leadership skills that scientists do not normally learn in graduate school. Mr. Sloan, the consummate executive and productivity expert who also loved both scientific research as well as management education, would likely take particular delight in this use of his funds. 

What interventions can promote equitable economic growth in regions left behind by the tech boom? Regional economic development is an increasingly urgent challenge for Sloan, for the United States, and throughout the world. Scholarly research needs to address innovation, prosperity, opportunity, and equity as related. One book that takes this on is Innovation in Real Places by Dan Breznitz, Professor in the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. He documents how the vaunted success of places like Silicon Valley, Tel Aviv, and Taiwan has been good for only a very few males from the upper classes and bad for most everyone else. Regions that simply try to emulate existing tech hubs waste lots of time, money, talent, and energy. Understanding how a given area can find its own niche in the global production processes makes much more sense.Together with two co-directors, Breznitz now leads the Innovation, Equity, and the Future of Prosperity (IEP) program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR).  The program brings together an international group of researchers from economics, sociology, geography, engineering, robotics, and history to develop a new approaches to studying place-based innovation, prosperity, and opportunity.  Sloan funds will help support IEP program operations including regular research workshops. CIFAR will also award Catalyst Grants to fund novel research collaborations among IEP program participants.

Most economists also agree that high or accelerating inflation is dangerous. Feedback loops can lead to hyperinflation and societal instability associated with hoarding, wage spirals, lending reluctance, extreme uncertainty, as well as other mechanisms.There are three main ways that runaway inflation can start. The first two, sudden supply decreases and sudden demand increases, have both occurred as the COVID pandemic has run its course. These shocks have widely been viewed as transitory, however. The third factor, self-fulfilling inflationary expectations, are more worrisome and less well understood. Central bankers therefore fight such expectations aggressively by, for example, imposing dramatic interest rate hikes and promising to "do whatever it takes" even if that means bringing on a recession to dampen demand.So, given the powerful role of inflationary expectations, what do we know about their formation, propagation, distribution, and effects? Most macroeconomic models, to the extent they incorporate expectations at all, oversimplify everything by positing a "representative agent." This helps with solving the equations but leaves out all the details about how different people feel and act under different circumstances. Behavioral Macro, a field Sloan helped launch, is gradually unpacking such "heterogeneity." One major goal is to figure out how expectations management could be better tailored to particular audiences rather than just trying to scare everyone. The necessary data are shockingly spotty, however. Along with their inflation rates, very few countries release population-wide averages of inflation expectations. Critically missing is comprehensive and compatible "microdata," i.e., information about individuals, their situations, and their beliefs concerning inflation. This grant seeks to fill this important gap.University of Chicago economists Michael Weber and Francesco D’Acunto will field an international survey to ask a representative sample of people from around the world about what they understand and expect concerning inflation. Experts ranging from researchers to policymakers have already shown great interest in this expensive and complicated undertaking. The data will be made available to the public with the hope that the success of such a pilot will lead to the running of global surveys like this on an ongoing basis.