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 many factors influencing that ratio, funder policies could be potentially important. How we attract applications, what we require applicants to do, and how we select among them all help shape the priorities and progress of the scientific enterprise. While funders like Sloan have broad control over our procedures, measuring the specific effects of changing those policies has traditionally been considered difficult at best. When it comes to evaluating policy implementations of any kind, the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is arguably the world’s premier organization dedicated to the design, execution, and interpretation of randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Based on J-PAL’s work since 2003 on international development, three of its founders shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics. With Sloan support, J-PAL’s North America branch was launched in 2013 by Amy Finkelstein, who was named a MacArthur Fellow five years later. What does J-PAL’s mission have to do with scientific productivity? The role of new discoveries and innovations in economic growth is an old story among economists, of course. J-PAL North America has therefore concluded that policies for accelerating the progress of science should be among those it studies to help alleviate poverty. But there are two main rate-limiters for conducting RCTs in that area: first, not everyone knows how to design, carry out, and interpret a rigorous RCT; and second, those who have that expertise also need to partner with institutions willing to host such rigorous evaluations. J-PAL’s new Science for Progress Initiative (SfPI) aims to fix that. Co-led by MacArthur Fellow Heidi Williams from Stanford and economist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist Paul Niehaus from the University of San Diego, SfPI will not only train and support a community of researchers, but also match them to organizations with important questions to answer about making science more productive. As a step towards accomplishing this, SfPI leader Heidi Williams has helped organize a workshop at the National Academy of Science on “Experimentation in Federal Funders.” Along with presentations from NSF, NIH, and other science agencies about what they want to learn from running policy evaluations, the U.S. Patent and Trade Office described how, inspired by what they already learned through randomized evaluations, a whole new office has been created there to run more RCTs in cooperation with academic researchers like the ones affiliated with SfPI.

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.