The grant funds a project by Claire Bowen, Lead Data Scientist at the Urban Institute, to facilitate more research on IRS data. Such data is extremely valuable for probing a series of pressing questions in social science, but the data is extremely sensitive. Strict privacy protection laws inhibit access to this data, such that hardly anyone outside the IRS has ever laid eyes on it. Bowen and her team propose to exploit recent mathematical advances in the theory of what’s called “differential privacy” to create tools that can be used to increase researcher access to IRS data without fear of violating the privacy of the American taxpayer. The project is divided into two parts. In the first, Bowen will create a high-quality synthetic dataset from original IRS data. Mathematical theory shows how to safely do this by reconstructing microdata details from statistical tables to which small bits of noise have been added. For many research questions, queries of this “noisy” synthetic dataset will provably yield the same answer that the same query would yield of the original IRS data, without the danger of exposing the identity of any of the individuals in the data. For some more complicated research questions--nonlinear calculations such as correlations or regression coefficients, for instance—there is no guarantee that queries of the synthetic noisy dataset will yield the same results as similar queries of the original. Without a means for further testing, researchers cannot be certain whether a relationship they find in the synthetic data is real or an artifact. The second part of Bowen’s project will address this concern through the construction of a “verification server.” The server, which would have access to the original IRS data, can verify whether a result reached through analysis of the synthetic dataset is consistent with the original data, guaranteeing the fidelity of research results without allowing researchers to see the sensitive data. If successfully constructed, this two-pronged system—synthetic dataset plus verification server—promises to provide researchers with reliable but privacy-protecting access to one of the most valuable datasets in social science.

Transportation is one of the largest sources of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States and, thus, a critical sector to address in the fight to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. New technological innovations—from the growth in hybrid and electric vehicles, to increases in parcel delivery, to advances in supply change management, to the potential emergence of autonomous vehicles—are rapidly changing the sector. These advancements create the need for new analysis about the role of cars, trains, trucks, and planes and the role transportation will play in energy system decarbonization.   This grant provides funds for a graduate student fellowship program aimed at supporting the work of doctoral students at two universities, University of Maryland and Carnegie Mellon University, who are interested in studying the energy and environmental implications of changes in the U.S. transportation sector. Run by economist Joshua Linn at the University of Maryland and engineer Kate Whitefoot at Carnegie Mellon University, the program will award seven one-year fellowships to early-career scholars wishing to pursue interdisciplinary, policy-relevant transportation research.

Responsibly evaluating different paths toward decarbonization of the energy system requires understanding how the benefits and burdens created are distributed across racial, economic, and geographic groups. This grant, led by Catie Hausman at the University of Maryland and Arik Levinson at Georgetown University, funds an initiative by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) to stimulate high quality research that examines the distributional equity dimensions of energy decarbonization in the United States.  NBER will hold two broad and open call for new research papers on these topics, one focusing on research examining the distributional effects of new energy technologies and the other focusing on the distributional effects of new energy policies.  The initiative expects to produce a total of 16 original high-quality papers on these topics, and the papers for each call will be shared with other scholars and experts at dissemination workshops.

Negative emissions technologies aim to combat rising atmospheric carbon emissions by capturing and removing carbon dioxide already present in the atmosphere and sequestering it safely underground or for reuse. Assessing the potential of these technologies requires insights from the social sciences—including economics, public policy, political science, sociology, and life cycle assessment, among others—on issues like how they might integrate with existing energy systems and how energy consumers and producers would respond to their deployment. Funds from this grant support the creation of a social science research fellowship program across multiple universities that will aim to foster research by young scholars interested in studying negative emissions technologies. Coordinated by Peter Schlosser at Arizona State University, a multidisciplinary committee will review and select four promising postdoctoral researchers for support and embed them for two years at one of a number of partner universities involved in negative emissions social science research.  In addition to salary support for each fellow, grant funds will support networking, learning, and professional development activities for the fellows, including opportunities for fellows to present their research to one another and to other scholars and practitioners in the energy community at large.

Industrial sources account for one-fifth of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Despite their important contributions to emissions, many industrial sub-sectors—such as cement, iron and steel, chemicals, and construction—are poorly represented in key integrated assessment models that are used to inform decisions about how to decarbonize the economy. In particular, these models do not reflect emerging low-carbon advancements in these sub-sectors that might improve decarbonization rates and affect overall emissions reductions in these sectors. One of the most often used integrated assessment models is GCAM, a popular open source model used by researchers to simulate how various decarbonization approaches and scenarios would affect both the environment and the economy over the long term. The GCAM module that represents industrial decarbonization has not been updated for nearly a decade and currently reflects only minimal information from a small number of industrial sectors and thus fails to capture new low-carbon developments across a range of industries. This grant funds a team of scholars led by Andres Clarens at the University of Virginia and CGAM developers based at the University of Maryland to update critical components of GCAM’s industrial decarbonization module. The focus of this project will be to combine information from high quality data sources, life cycle assessments, and expert elicitations to improve GCAM’s representation of five crucial industrial sectors: cement (one of the largest industries from a decarbonization perspective), chemicals production, construction, nonferrous metals, and mining.  

Founded in 2013 by Jason Bordoff, the Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP) at Columbia University has quickly become one of the leading academic research centers focused on analyzing all aspects of the U.S. energy system. A first class research institute in its own right, CGEP also excels at bridging the researcher-policymaker divide.  It accessibly condenses and summarizes complicated research, connects research results with their implications for policy, and creates venues to effectively disseminate research to decision-makers, media, and the public.  Funds for this grant support the creation of two additional professional positions at CGEP: a senior research director and a managing editor.  The research director will be responsible for managing all components of research production and will oversee CGEP’s research quality control procedures, including its internal and external review processes. The managing editor’s role will be to assist in the research review process and generate various outputs for dissemination that will help make CGEP’s work more relevant and accessible to decision-makers. Both the research director and managing editor positions are critical in overseeing the variety of research outputs produced by CGEP and will cement CGEP’s central role of bringing high quality, objective research to those stakeholders entrusted to act in the public interest. Grant funds will support these positions for their initial two-year period to help inaugurate these roles.  

Energy economics research can be a starkly solitary endeavor. Training is rarely team-based, leaving energy economics students with little experience working in large groups or across disciplines, even as demand is rising for the sort of interdisciplinary scholarship that can meaningfully addresses complicated questions about the interconnections between energy, the environment, and climate change. The Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC) has developed a collaboration-oriented, team-based, two-year research experience and training program for predoctoral students—those with undergraduate or Master’s degrees—that looks to engage researchers early in their career and introduce them to a more integrated, interdisciplinary approach to scholarship. Selected students work with University of Chicago economics faculty on a wide variety of research projects. In addition to receiving high-quality research experience, predoctoral fellows receive dedicated faculty mentorship, cutting-edge data science training, and networking opportunities. EPIC has designed an extensive orientation program for the fellows, along with a series of professional development activities that provide guidance and assistance to help them determine potential next steps in their careers. Funds from this grant will provide stipend and administrative support for four fellows in the EPIC program over the next two years.