This grant supports a third year of the Age Smart Employer Awards, an annual awards program that honors innovative New York City employers who have adopted effective strategies to recruit, engage, and retain older workers. Emerging research shows that older workers offer distinct advantages to employers. As a group, they are viewed by managers and human resource professionals as motivated, reliable, loyal, and superior in interpersonal communication skills compared to younger workers. Additional research suggests that workforces that are heterogeneous in terms of age are more creative than homogeneous ones. Additionally, because older workers mirror aging consumers, they relate to customers in a growing “silver economy.”  Yet, these advantages are often discounted or offset by employers’ concerns about the costs of employing older workers. The Age Smart Employer Awards aim to combat these concerns by honoring those employers who are successfully facilitating age-diverse workforces. Grant funds will support the administration of a third year of the awards; outreach and publicity efforts; the development of a new tool to help employers understand, identify, and articulate Age Smart practices and policies; expansion of the awards to three new localities; and efforts to expand the Awards’ institutional partners.

Though public sector workers make up 15 percent of the U.S. workforce, little is known about how public sector workers make retirement-related choices and transition from full-time employment to full retirement. Funds from this grant support research by North Carolina State University (NCSU) economist Robert Clark to address this knowledge gap. Using original panel survey data and extensive administrative data from the North Carolina Retirement System, Clark and his research team will examine several important issues, including how older public workers in North Carolina plan for work-to-retirement transitions; how they execute plans to leave career jobs; how they move into new types of employment; and how they ensure income security in complete retirement. In addition to producing research addressing these issues, the grant will also result in a longitudinal panel dataset that, upon application, will be available to scholars interested in the public sector workforce.

This grant continues support for efforts by the WNYC Health Unit to produce high-quality radio reporting on health care economics and policy. With Sloan funds, WNYC convenes an annual workshop with leading health care practitioners, economists, and policy experts to discuss health care reform and policy change resulting from the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and to identify subjects for news coverage that focus on health care policy and the economics of the health system in New York and the tristate region. Subjects identified for coverage are then often featured on WNYC’s weekly podcast, Only Human. Potential topics to be covered over the next two years include maternal health care costs in New York, how race and income affect costs and health outcomes, the funding crisis faced by New York City's public hospitals, comparing New York’s state-based health care exchanges to New Jersey’s federal exchange, millennials and mental health, and the Affordable Care Act after Obama. In addition to reporting, WNYC will also launch four community engagement projects that empower listeners with information and encourage beneficial behavioral changes and two to four public events aimed at raising public understanding and engagement with health issues.

Funds from this grant provide continued support for the production and distribution of Science Friday, the only regular weekly public radio program that devotes two hours to all things science. Grant funds will support the production of 50 radio segments per year, 5 digital videos per year, 12 articles per year produced and disseminated through the show’s website, an annual multimedia spotlight on a science topic, a yearly Book Club event, and a single special remote broadcast of the show. Science Friday’s audience—the program reaches over two million people each week via its radio show, web streaming, podcasts, blogs, online videos, mobile apps, and social media presence—makes it one of the single most effective channels for dissemination of high-quality, engaging content about the increasingly central role science plays in modern life.

This grant supports a project by data scientist Matthew Gee and labor economist Iona Marinescu to create an administrative data research facility that will compile high-quality private administrative data on various aspects of the U.S. labor force. Gee and Marinescu’s Workforce Data Initiative will partner with private firms that have valuable administrative data on U.S. workers, including ADP, LinkedIn, Glass Door, O*Net, and CareerBuilder, combine these datasets with relevant publicly available data, and modify and “munge” these data into forms useable by researchers. The resulting datasets will constitute a valuable new resource for economists looking to answer pertinent questions on a host of important issues, including the post-2008 economic recovery, the resilience of local job markets, patterns in layoffs, and wage stickiness.

This grant supports an initiative by Esther Duflo at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) to infuse more rigorous methodology into empirical economics. Mobilizing J-PAL’s formidable research and training programs, Duflo will promote practices such as preregistration of experiment plans; prepublication re-analysis of results; and open sharing of datasets, code, and supporting documentation. Funded activities include a series of graduate fellowships for economics students who work on enhancing reproducibility and the development with MIT of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on best economics research practices.

Funds from this grant provide three years of support for the continued development of QuantEcon.org, an online resource for code, data, tutorials, and lectures on quantitative economic modeling. The brainchild of economists John Stachurski of Australian National University and Thomas Sargent of New York University, QuantEcon provides open source modules for economists seeking to model a variety of economic phenomena, covering topics from asset pricing to optimal savings. Grant funds will support a variety of improvements to the site, including the addition of 20 new lectures, an innovative data portal, an open notebook archive, and expanded code libraries. Additional funds will support efforts to move the site toward independent sustainability and to connect its offerings to other economic research institutions. Funds for the development of QuantEcon have been granted to NUMFocus, a nonprofit organization that provides administrative, operational, and strategic support to scientific software projects.

This grant provides partial support for production of a six-part history of the African continent to be hosted by the prominent academic Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher Professor at Harvard University and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African American Research. Foundation funds will support segments devoted to documenting the scientific, technological, and engineering achievements of various African civilizations, including such events as the founding of the world's oldest university at Al-Karouine in Morocco in 859 AD; the advanced mathematics developed in Fes, Marakesh, and Timbuktu between the 12th and 17th centuries; and Abu Raihan al-Biruni's precise calculation of Earth's radius. The proposed documentary series not only contains interesting information about the historical development of science and technology, but also challenges widespread stereotypes of Africa as backward and undeveloped and the widespread misunderstanding of the pivotal role African civilizations have played in humanity’s scientific and cultural advance.

NumFOCUS (the NumPy Foundation for Open Code for Usable Science) is a nonprofit founded to handle funds and act as a fiscal sponsor for many essential projects in the open source data science software stack, including several Sloan grantees. Projects choose to affiliate with NumFOCUS for mostly logistical reasons: lower overhead costs than universities; less-bureaucratic finance operations; and greater flexibility for operating across countries and organizations (e.g., hiring a research assistant at a third-party organization). The collection of so many open source projects under one umbrella, however, promises the opportunity to rapidly circulate best practices among member projects. One of the biggest issues shared across the NumFOCUS portfolio is project sustainability. Fund from this grant will help NumFOCUS build capacity in the areas of business planning and industry outreach to serve its portfolio of projects. Funding includes two years of support for a projects director, for efforts to build relationships with industry sponsors, for an annual workshop on business models and sustainability strategies for member projects, and to provide business plan and sustainability mentoring for projects that request it.

This grant funds research by Professor William Nazaroff, an expert on the physics and chemistry of indoor air pollutants, and Professor Allen Goldstein, an expert on anthropogenic and natural contributions to the chemical composition of the atmosphere. The researchers are working to expand the understanding of processes controlling abundance, sources, and fates of organic chemicals indoors, focusing on the roles of human occupants as agents influencing indoor air chemistry. Over a several-week period, the researchers will monitor the indoor air of a residence under five conditions: (a) house vacant, emphasis on spatial resolution; (b) house vacant, emphasis on temporal resolution; (c) house normally occupied, emphasis on spatial resolution; (d) house normally occupied, emphasis on temporal resolution; and (e) manipulation experiments, such as cooking, cleaning, or dishwashing. Monitoring will focus on detecting several important chemicals, including volatile organic compounds (VOCs), nitrate radicals, nitrogen oxide trace gases, carbon dioxide, and ozone. In addition, the team will sample environmental conditions such as temperature, relative humidity, ultrafine particulate concentration, and air exchange rates. Samples will then be analyzed to try to apportion VOC chemical concentrations in sampled indoor air to their sources, including outdoor air, building-associated sources present when the residence is vacant, occupant-associated sources, and secondary production from indoor chemical reactions. This project will generate important new insights into indoor chemistry, which will be shared through peer-reviewed publications and presentations at conferences and meetings. At least three students will be trained during the course of the project.