Founded with Sloan Foundation support in 2013 and based at MIT, J-PAL North America is a regional hub of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, a global network of economic researchers who share a dedication to promoting the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in economics. RCTs are a powerful research methodology in social science, the “gold standard” for drawing robust conclusions about causal relationships. Researchers affiliated with J-PAL North America have completed nearly 100 rigorous studies of a wide range of relevant issues, including the effect of summer jobs on juvenile delinquency, whether you can improve student performance by paying for good grades, what information can reduce consumer reliance on payday loans, and a host of other studies on the topics of voting, crime, discrimination, and health care. This grant provides core operating support to J-PAL North America for the continuation of these and related activities for three years. Funded activities under this grant include a new series of Design Within Reach forums, in which researchers exchange early feedback on the design of planned RCTs; a Short-Term Research Management program that provides hands-on administrative assistance to researchers during the early stages of planning, piloting, and implementing an RCT; an outreach initiative to promote interactions between researchers and policymakers; and an ongoing collaboration with the global J-PAL network to address the challenges and opportunities posed by administrative data.

This grant to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) supports a predoctoral fellowship program that will support Ph.D. students carrying out research in behavioral macroeconomics. Four dissertation fellowships will be awarded to promising graduate students for a period of two years each. Potential dissertation topics include the aggregate implications of limited information, decision-making with flawed models, how expectations are formed, optimal policy design, and the interaction of economic agents with different levels of knowledge or economic sophistication. In addition to the fellowships, grant funds will support an NBER initiative to expand the community of behavioral economists by holding one-week boot camps each year that will train two dozen young scholars in topics in behavioral macroeconomics.

The Colorado School of Mines, in collaboration with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), has established a new, unique graduate program in Advanced Energy Systems. Working closely with faculty and researchers from both institutions, doctoral students will move seamlessly between Mines and NREL to augment their academic training with hands-on experience, providing a robust, multidisciplinary foundation for understanding and analyzing energy systems. This grant supports this innovative new doctoral program in three ways. First, it will provide two years of salary support for a program director staff position; the program director will be responsible for overseeing program management, student recruitment, external partnerships, and donor outreach. Second, it provides funds for a student-run seminar series that will allow students to bring in external energy experts to enrich the training program. Third, it provides funds for the development and implementation of a summer research program for enrolled doctoral students, helping select students in the Ph.D. program pursue individualized research projects in furtherance of their training and education.

This grant supports an innovative training and professional development program at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) to give early-career scientists and economists the skills needed to effectively conduct policy-relevant research in an applied setting, outside a college or university. Training covers such topics as communications, proposal writing, program management, and team leadership and features a series of workshops that separately target postbaccalaureates and postdoctoral researchers to reflect the different skill development needs of these two groups.   Funds from this grant will allow EDF to enhance and expand this program. Formerly focused on training EDF’s in-house junior scientists, the program will expand through a series of institutional partnerships to include other early-career researchers at other universities and NGOs. The curriculum will also expand to include a series of monthly in-person or virtual workshops on relevant topics, including data science and empirical research methods. Additional funds support efforts to track and evaluate the impact of the program, to place trained scientists in policy-relevant positions at NGOs or in government, and to distill and disseminate lessons learned to those institutions interested in starting similar programs. EDF plans to integrate aspects of this program into its standard professional development activities by the conclusion of this grant.