Grants Database

The Foundation awards approximately 200 grants per year (excluding the Sloan Research Fellowships), totaling roughly $80 million dollars in annual commitments in support of research and education in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and economics. This database contains grants for currently operating programs going back to 2008. For grants from prior years and for now-completed programs, see the annual reports section of this website.

Grants Database

Grantee
Amount
City
Year
  • grantee: University of California, Office of the President
    amount: $747,258
    city: Oakland, CA
    year: 2017

    To develop and deploy infrastructure necessary to elevate data to a first-class research output

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Scholarly Communication
    • Investigator Guenter Waibel

    One obstacle to developing effective data citation practices is that data does not behave like a published article. It can be far more complex, can exist in many successive versions (none of which are canonical), and only a part of a given dataset might be used by a given study. An effective data citation regime must reflect the multitude of ways data can be used in research. These issues were taken up by the California Digital Library (CDL) in a 2014 National Science Foundation planning study to explore the idea of “data level metrics” and determine which metrics would be of most value to researchers. The grant funds an expansion of this work, as the CDL assembles a coalition to implement their findings. Over the next two years, CDL will bring together the organization that mints DOIs for datasets (DataCite) and the organization that manages the standard for article download and access data (COUNTER) with a collection of data repositories (DataONE) in order to implement best data citation practices using extensions to the popular Lagotto article usage tracking software. Beyond their own implementation, this collaboration will work with the Research Data Alliance to build consensus for and recruit additional repositories to adopt their best practices and technical solutions.

    To develop and deploy infrastructure necessary to elevate data to a first-class research output

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  • grantee: The American Assembly
    amount: $749,399
    city: New York, NY
    year: 2017

    To support the growth and sustainability of a large-scale online database of university course syllabi

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Scholarly Communication
    • Investigator Joseph Karaganis

    In 2013, the Sloan Foundation approved a two-year grant to Joe Karaganis at the American Assembly to prototype a system to aggregate and make available data about what materials are assigned on course syllabi. The resulting Open Syllabus Project team publicly launched the first version of their Syllabus Explorer in early 2016. Within two months, the site logged over 250,000 visits, and was written up in the Chronicle of Higher Education as well as The New York Times, the Washington Post, and Time magazine. Funds from this grant provide continuing support to the effort, allowing the project to increase both the scale and richness of the syllabus data available for analysis. Funded activities include development of algorithms to allow the database to better recognize articles in STEM fields, expansion of the platform to enable the incorporation of datasets, software, and other items that might be published with a Document Object Identifier, and a pilot partnership with the Digital Public Library of America to mobilize the syllabus data in the service of public libraries.  

    To support the growth and sustainability of a large-scale online database of university course syllabi

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  • grantee: University of Toronto
    amount: $474,606
    city: Toronto, Canada, Canada
    year: 2017

    To study the behavioral welfare economics of how nudges affect financial decision making

    • Program Research
    • Sub-program Economics
    • Investigator Sandro Ambuehl

    Suppose you observe people making economic decisions that do not appear to be in their own best interest. Say they are not saving enough for retirement. Policymakers may decide to “nudge” those people into saving more, following the precepts put forth by Sunstein and Thaler in their popular book about behavioral economics. But is this, on balance, a good idea? Perhaps some people have good reasons to “undersave” (e.g., perhaps the person has a wealthy spouse). Evaluating a policy “nudge” like programs to increase saving would involve asking if the net benefit to those targeted outweighs the cost of the intervention. Determining when this is the case is a problem in “Behavioral Welfare Economics” and involves important questions about when choices represent mistakes on the part of the chooser, when they do not, and how much choosers value the opportunity to correct mistakes they make.  This grant supports work by Sandro Ambuehl from the University of Toronto and Doug Bernheim from Stanford to study how to measure welfare losses incurred due to irrational mistakes. The team will field several experiments that give subjects two financial choices that look different but are actually the same and then measure both the subjects’ willingness to pay for one option over the other and their willingness to pay to have the choice between options simplified. The results promise to shed new light on how the choosers value the ability to make good decisions and how that value is related to the likely costs of a poor choice.

    To study the behavioral welfare economics of how nudges affect financial decision making

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  • grantee: New York University
    amount: $491,605
    city: New York, NY
    year: 2017

    To study how attention and perception affect microeconomic behaviors and macroeconomic outcomes

    • Program Research
    • Sub-program Economics
    • Investigator Andrew Caplin

    Over the past 30 years, behavioral research has succeeded in generating many examples of how people routinely violate traditional economic assumptions that human actors are rational optimizers of their preferences. So far, however, behavioral economists have not succeeded in generating a coherent set of principles that could replace these assumptions. The grant funds a project led by Mike Woodford of Columbia, Andrew Caplin from NYU, and Ernst Fehr from the University of Zurich, to take up this challenge. The team hypothesizes that much of what we have observed in behavioral economics can be systematized and explained through the lens of attentional constraints. There are also limits on how much attention people can pay to any given situation or decision. Nonoptimal decisions like those observed by behavioral economists can be best explained, they theorize, by thinking of them as the result of the allocation of limited attentional or decision-making resources. Grant funds will support the team as they work on developing and testing this theory. Additional funds support a series of summer schools and workshops to further engage the larger community of scholars on these issues.

    To study how attention and perception affect microeconomic behaviors and macroeconomic outcomes

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  • grantee: University of Michigan
    amount: $738,000
    city: Ann Arbor, MI
    year: 2017

    To support research on the economics of science that uses new data from universities about academic funding, spending, and training

    • Program Research
    • Sub-program Economics
    • Investigator Jason Owen-Smith

    The Institute for Research on Innovation and Science (IRIS) provides data and data management services in support of fundamental research on the results of public and private investments in discovery, innovation, and education. Partnering with dozens of research universities, IRIS collects and processes administrative data, links those files with restricted federal microdata, and make the fully documented results available to researchers. Data compiled by IRIS bear on a host of interesting issues about the practice of modern science in a university setting, including return on investment, the productivity of scientific teams, and whether university science labs have spillover effects on local economies. Funds from this grant provide three years of support to IRIS to expand its operations and facilitate use of IRIS data by researchers.

    To support research on the economics of science that uses new data from universities about academic funding, spending, and training

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  • grantee: National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    amount: $724,000
    city: Cambridge, MA
    year: 2017

    To organize and support innovative research on the economics of digitization

    • Program Research
    • Sub-program Economics
    • Investigator Shane Greenstein

    Digitization changes everything. The rapid decline in marginal costs for information storage, processing, and networking, for example, challenges many basic assumptions of textbook economics. Traditional concepts and analytical tools provide limited help understanding recent phenomena such as on-demand labor markets, zero-cost reproduction of copyrighted material, or exclusively ad-supported consumption goods. This grant provides three years of continued support to the Economics of Digitization Working Group at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Under the leadership of Professors Shane Greenstein and Josh Lerner from Harvard and Scott Stern from MIT, the working group brings together top scholars to address issues such as digital markets for books, music, and the news; online privacy and piracy; government regulation of the internet; the economic implications of artificial intelligence; and the economics of two-sided markets. Grant funds will support two meetings of the working group per year, an annual student tutorial, a small grant program to support new work on the economics of digitization, and outreach and support to the growing community of researchers interested in working on these and related issues.  

    To organize and support innovative research on the economics of digitization

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  • grantee: Haverford College
    amount: $302,246
    city: Haverford, PA
    year: 2017

    To teach more undergraduate social scientists about integrity, transparency, and reproducibility in empirical research

    • Program Research
    • Sub-program Economics
    • Investigator Richard Ball

    Improving the reliability of empirical research will require many strategies over many years. One “theory of change” is to start at the beginning by targeting undergraduates during their first experiences with collecting, processing, and interpreting data. If inculcated in college, good habits and rigorous expectations can last a lifetime. The benefits will be seen not only among those who go on to become academics, but also among those who become doctors, lawyers, leaders, and informed citizens generally. With this motivation, economist Richard Ball has developed the Teaching Integrity in Empirical Research (TIER) Protocol, which guides novice researchers on how to work with data. Starting with liberal arts colleges, over 120 faculty have participated in extended workshops on how to teach this protocol, and it is being used in 25 courses, and been featured in webinars run by the American Statistical Association. Funds from this grant provide support to Ball to continue expanding valuable partnerships, training programs, and curricular development projects for the TIER protocol, with particular emphasis on improving its footprint at research universities.

    To teach more undergraduate social scientists about integrity, transparency, and reproducibility in empirical research

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  • grantee: The University of Chicago
    amount: $700,000
    city: Chicago, IL
    year: 2017

    To compile accurate and comprehensive microdata about household income by developing new methods for combining survey results with administrative data

    • Program Research
    • Sub-program Economics
    • Investigator Bruce Meyer

    Funds from this grant support a project by economist Bruce Meyer of the University of Chicago to create a rich new dataset for the measurement of U.S. household income. Partnering with the Census Bureau, Meyer plans to link and reconcile data from a host of important, but currently separate government surveys and data sources, including the Current Population Survey, the Consumer Expenditure Survey, and American Community Survey, the Survey of Income and Program Participation, tax return data from the IRS, and information from important government programs like SNAP and TANF. The resulting dataset, to be called the Comprehensive Income Dataset, would significantly expand the analytic power of these datasets taken separately and would also ease several well-known obstacles to the measurement of U.S. household income. Grant funds will support the initial construction of the dataset, which will then be made available for use by scholars through Federal Statistical Data Research Centers.

    To compile accurate and comprehensive microdata about household income by developing new methods for combining survey results with administrative data

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  • grantee: New Jersey Institute of Technology
    amount: $509,038
    city: Newark, NJ
    year: 2017

    To develop and test privacy-protection techniques that enable researchers to collect and analyze sensitive data

    • Program Research
    • Sub-program Economics
    • Investigator Kurt Rohloff

    Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) allows researchers to analyze encrypted data accurately without decrypting those data. It is an intriguing method for providing access to sensitive datasets while respecting both privacy concerns and licensing agreements and may eventually have significant use in privacy-protecting research protocols. This grant funds a project to demonstrate the usefulness of FHE algorithms in academic research. Computer scientists Kurt Rohloff from New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) and Shafi Goldwasser from MIT are partnering with the University of Michigan’s Institute for Research on Innovation and Science (IRIS). IRIS collects sensitive data from universities on grant spending and staffing. Rohloff and Goldwater will develop an FHE computing environment and associated algorithms designed to analyze this sensitive data while observing necessary privacy-protecting protocols. Grant funds will support graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and programmers working on the project, a social scientist to consult closely with the team about the needs and practices of empirical researchers, and outreach to potential users through workshops, publications, and presentations at professional conferences.

    To develop and test privacy-protection techniques that enable researchers to collect and analyze sensitive data

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  • grantee: Brookings Institution
    amount: $500,000
    city: Washington, DC
    year: 2017

    To continue supporting the production and dissemination of accessible, reliable, and influential research through the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity

    • Program Research
    • Sub-program Economics
    • Investigator Janice Eberly

    The conferences and journal volumes produced by the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (BPEA) are premier outlets for policy-relevant research on economics. Biannual meetings feature invited speakers as well as a wide spectrum of policymakers, researchers, and other participants. Only commissioned papers that are carefully edited, presented, critiqued, and revised eventually appear in the journal, where they are published together with discussants’ written comments. Many of the most distinguished and active economists on the national scene regularly turn to this platform as a way of conveying timely ideas in a relatively nontechnical but highly visible format. All kinds of policymakers and media from across the political spectrum end up citing BPEA papers quite frequently. Brookings and the BPEA remain among the few institutions in Washington where respectful, impartial, nonpartisan, and evidence-based debate about economic issues still thrives. This grant provides three years of support for the continued publication of the BPEA. 

    To continue supporting the production and dissemination of accessible, reliable, and influential research through the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity

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