The ability to accurately predict the U.S. labor force participation rate among older workers is important, not least because it bears significantly on the finances of the Social Security system. Traditional methods for predicting this crucial statistic involve extrapolating from past trends. Past trends, however, may not continue. Over the past 25 years, for instance, the labor force participation rate of the population aged 60 to 69 has been increasing, in part because Americans in their 60s were getting progressively healthier. But recent studies suggest this is no longer the case. What effects, if any, will the halting of this trend toward better health in older Americans have on labor force participation rates? This grant funds the work of researchers Susann Rohwedder and Michael Hurd, who are examining this issue. Using twelve waves of data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), Rohwedder and Hurd will study how labor force participation at older ages has increased even as some determinants of participation have worsened and examine whether the trend toward working at older ages is likely to continue, especially in view of adverse trends in health. One particular focus of their work will be the relationship between labor force participation rates and individuals’ forecasts about how long they will continue to work as they age, examining how predictive these forecasts have been in the past and how their predictive power varies along multiple dimensions. Once this relationship is better understood, the hope is to use this knowledge to inform forecasts of labor force participation rates going forward.

This grant supports the planning of a project led by Richard Johnson and Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute to identify, simulate, and evaluate policy reforms that, taken alone, as well as simultaneously, would reduce work disincentives at older ages and more equitably and efficiently provide retirement benefits to older adults. In so doing, this larger project would provide important new information about the likely costs and benefits of reforming Social Security, Medicare, employer-sponsored retirement plans, and tax incentives for retirement saving. The larger project will use DYNASIM, the Urban Institute’s dynamic microsimulation model, to simulate the likely impact of potential retirement program reforms across a vast array of dimensions, including effects on employment at older ages; on older adults’ household wealth; on annual income; on lifetime Social Security benefits; on income tax payments; and on out-of-pocket spending on medical care. The team will also model the effects of hypothetical reforms on government revenues and outlays. The planning activities funded by this grant will lay the groundwork for the larger project by implementing necessary enhancements to DYNASIM, specifying criteria for evaluating policy reforms, and making the case for the need to reform retirement programs to eliminate work disincentives.

Funds from this grant to the Tribeca Film Institute (TFI) support two years of the Sloan Student Grand Jury Prize, an annual prize awarded to the single best science-themed student screenplay produced by a student at one of the Foundation’s six film school partners. The award package is $50,000 per year, of which $30,000 goes directly to the student filmmaker. The balance of the award funds support a noted industry mentor to guide the project, a committed science advisor, and other marketing and distribution efforts to maximize the screenplay’s chances of production. The aim of this effort is to stimulate greater interest and excitement among the six participating film schools and film students by awarding a “best of the best” prize and fast-tracking the winning project for development so it becomes a major career opportunity. The Student Grand Jury Prize offers enhanced visibility, prestige, and a career boost to the student winner working on a science-themed script and fosters healthy competition within the film school program.

This grant supports an initiative at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (NYU Tisch) to incentivize the creation of feature films about science and technology through an annual award of $100,000 given to help an outstanding science-themed student film project move to production. Each year a distinguished committee of filmmakers and scientists from NYU’s Kanbar Institute of Film and Television will publicize the award among students and accept and evaluate film treatments. Filmmakers selected as semifinalists receive a $5,000 award to produce their script and are connected with an expert scholar to serve as a mentor and to ensure the accuracy of the scientific work and characters presented. The winning filmmaker from among the semifinalists will receive $100,000 to be used to move the script into production. Scripts are eligible only if they explore scientific or technological themes or employ scientists, mathematicians, or engineers as major characters. In addition, NYU holds an annual reception for the winner and engages in media outreach to publicize the awards. Grant funds provide core operating support for this awards program for three years.

This grant funds a two-year study by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) to help improve our understanding of public attitudes to science—especially how people encounter science in everyday life—and to suggest ways to improve outreach, particularly to underserved communities. This effort is part of a three-year Academy initiative, The Public Face of Science, to address various elements of the relationship between scientists and the public. The AAAS team will first compile data on public engagement with science, broadly defined to include watching film, theater, and other storytelling media with science and technology themes, as well as attendance at zoos, aquaria, and science museums, and use of the internet and social media to access scientific content. After conducting and publishing the baseline study, the AAAS will commission six papers from leading researchers to identify gaps in the existing data and ways to address them, with an emphasis on reaching underserved communities. These six papers will be presented and discussed at an Academy workshop in 2017, which will then generate a final report with recommendations for addressing gaps.

This grant provides continuing operational support for the successful science radio show and podcast Radiolab. Expected outputs include 21 science-themed podcasts per year plus one hour-long broadcast per week (distilled from original and archival podcasts). The Radiolab production team will also continue to produce live events to supplement their online content, with eight communication events or lectures planned each year and two annual live events. Grant funds will provide core operating support for Radiolab for two years.

Federal and state governments provide a wide array of direct and indirect subsidies to many energy supply technologies. Since these subsidies affect the economic competitiveness of different energy sources, it is important to develop objective and accurate estimates of their magnitude. Funds from this grant support work by Frank Wolak, a senior energy economist at Stanford, to develop a standardized schema for the categorization of different forms of government subsidy. Wolak will then collaborate with other leading energy economists to apply this framework and undertake a series of technology-specific analyses that will quantify the extent of subsidies provided to various energy sources, such as coal, natural gas, oil, wind, solar, and nuclear. All participating researchers will then convene at a workshop to review and compare each of these analyses and suggest areas of improvement. Finally, Wolak will develop a general equilibrium model that extends the results of these source-specific subsidy analyses and accounts for interactions between subsidies for different energy sources. He will consider, for example, how changes in the subsidies provided for wind power impact subsidies provided for other energy sources, such as oil or gas. This general equilibrium methodology will be the subject of a second review workshop, and the whole project will culminate in a series of final conferences that will lay out the ultimate findings for researchers and policymakers.

The answers to a host of pressing questions in energy policy, such as how best to help consumers use electricity more efficiently or where to site new electricity distribution infrastructure, depend crucially on a nuanced understanding of how consumers use electricity and how that demand differs from household to household. New opportunities to study differences in household electricity consumption have arisen in recent years thanks to the increasingly widespread installation of smart electricity meters that track household energy use at finely grained intervals, in some cases measuring energy consumption as frequently as every 15 minutes. Partnering with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), Michael Webber, deputy director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas, Austin, plans to explore household electricity usage patterns by integrating ERCOT’s 15?minute residential smart meter data with other relevant data sets, such as local tax records, demographic statistics, meteorological data, and locational marginal pricing information. Webber has identified a set of initial hypotheses to be tested through an examination of the integrated data set, including how energy use varies with income, time of day across different locations in Texas, and the introduction of demand response programs. Funds from this grant will help Webber and his team take in the over 45 terabytes of ERCOT smart meter data, suitably anonymize the data set, merge it with additional information sources, and disseminate it for use by other researchers.

This grant funds an annual three-day seminar, hosted by Columbia University’s Center on Global and Energy Policy (CGEP), that aims to train and inform journalists tasked with covering multifaceted developments in energy economics, energy markets, energy geopolitics, and energy innovation. Using active discussion and interactive modules, the seminars will introduce participating journalists to emerging research findings on a broad number of complex topics, including oil price volatility, solar energy, and shale gas development, presented by leading experts from academia, industry, and government. Approximately 15 journalists will be selected to participate each year through a competitive application process and selected participants will be asked to commit to producing a substantial number of articles that reflect the training program’s focus on providing a multidisciplinary view of key energy issues.

Transportation accounts for a large fraction of both U.S. petroleum consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, and continues to be an important contributor to local concentrations of nitrogen oxide and ozone. This grant funds a project by Resources for the Future (RFF) that will examine and assess consumer demand for low-carbon vehicles, be they electric cars or nonelectric cars with high fuel economy ratings. Partnering with Maritz CX Research, a private market research firm with detailed information on individual consumer purchasing decisions of new vehicles and their attributes, the RFF team will analyze more than five years of records related to how consumers make decisions about vehicle purchases, totaling nearly one million observations of car purchasing decisions. While this remains a small fraction of total domestic car purchases over that time period, the data set is larger and of higher quality than any publicly available data source that has been explored in the transportation economics literature to date. RFF will examine this rich data set by exploring how consumers value low-carbon vehicle attributes, consumer demand for innovations in the electric vehicle market, and the interactions between fuel prices and greenhouse gas mitigation standards that have been set for the transportation sector.