This grant provides two years of funding for the Sloan Student Grand Prize. This annual prize is awarded to the single best student screenplay produced by a student from one of the Foundation’s six film school partners (AFI, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, NYU, UCLA, and USC) and supports the development of that script into a finished film. The prize stimulates interest and excitement among the participating film schools and film students by awarding a “best-of-the-best” prize and by fast-tracking the winning project for development so it becomes a major career opportunity. The award package is $50,000 per year, of which $30,000 goes directly to the student filmmaker. The remaining $20,000 funds an industry mentor to guide the project, a committed science advisor, and other marketing (meetings, readings, events) and distribution efforts to maximize the screenplay’s chances of production.

This grant supports efforts by economists Mark Duggan of Stanford University and Courtney Coile of Wellesley College to increase our understanding of how incentives created by public policy affect labor market behavior of older workers by examining changes to the Veterans Administration Disability Compensation (VA-DC) program. Their work seeks to exploit a “natural experiment” occasioned by a 2001 change in the VA-DC that increased the generosity of the program, particularly for veterans of the Vietnam War. Analyzing administrative data on enrollees both before and after the change in policy, Duggan and Coile will estimate the effect of VA-DC enrollment on older veterans’ labor market outcomes; determine how these effects vary with age, race, ethnicity, marital status, educational attainment, and health; explore the effect of VA-DC enrollment on spouses’ labor market outcomes; examine the effect on enrollment in other government programs and on enrollees’ health status and economic well-being; and investigate whether expansions in the program’s eligibility criteria increased the sensitivity of older veterans’ labor market outcomes to economic conditions.

New technologies in a workplace—new devices, new software systems, new production techniques—often require workers to acquire new skills. Workers who do not learn how to properly use these new technologies become less productive relative to workers who do and, in theory, less valuable to their employer. This grant funds work by Nicole Maestas of the RAND Corporation to examine how technological change affects the employment outcomes of older workers. Using a large dataset on German workers, Maestas and her team will analyze how technological innovations affect wage growth, employment status, and exit from the labor market among older workers; whether older workers are less likely than younger workers to receive training after innovation changes; and whether training can reduce or reverse the potential negative effects of innovation on the employment outcomes of older workers.

This grant supports an initiative by the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies (HCPDS) to launch an interdisciplinary, postdoctoral training program, the Sloan Fellowship on Aging and Work, which will support leading young scholars who wish to use multidisciplinary approaches to study the social and economic challenges posed by the aging work force. Led by center director Lisa Berkman, the HCPDS fellowship program will support three postdoctoral fellows for two-year terms beginning in September 2016. Fellows will be selected through a competitive application process, with candidates evaluated based on a number of criteria, including the quality of past work, the strength of their proposed research plans, and their potential to integrate questions, approaches, or analysis from two or more disciplines, including epidemiology, economics, psychology, neuroscience, and sociology.

This grant supports efforts by the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) to improve the ways colleges and universities collect data on the career pathways and outcomes of graduate students in doctoral programs. CGS will spearhead the development and dissemination of an instrument to be used by departments at colleges and universities to track the careers of those that graduate from their doctoral programs. In addition, it will provide universities with a framework for administering the surveys and analyzing responses. Unlike the data collected in the Survey of Doctorate Recipients and the Survey of Earned Doctorates, which are aggregated nationally, the CGS effort would be focused on data aggregated at the departmental and institutional levels and would focus on improving individual graduate programs; enhance institutional services to graduate students; inform prospective and current graduate students about careers associated with particular degree programs; and increase the awareness of policymakers, funders, and the broader public about the professional and social contributions of doctorate holders—wherever their lives take them. Data collection is envisioned to continue for 15 years post-matriculation.

Funds from this grant continue operational support to the NBER Working Group on Household Finance, a group of researchers from economics departments, business schools, government, and industry who come together to work on questions about household balance sheets and financial decision-making. Under the leadership of Brigitte Madrian of Harvard and Steve Zeldes of Columbia, the group holds regular meetings, shares new developments in the field, identifies gaps in the research literature and promising ways to fill them, develops research projects, and convenes a well-attended biennial meeting on the economics of household finance. Additional initiatives planned for the next three years include a postdoctoral fellowship program to help engage the next generation of rising economists in the field of household finance, and a project focused on developing new methods, standards, and courses related to the use of administrative and government data.

People eligible for government benefits do not always make use of them. This goes for everything from health insurance subsidies to federal weatherization incentives to tax breaks for retirement savings to student loan forgiveness plans. For social scientists, particularly behavioral economists, the underutilization of such benefits is a vexing puzzle. Working with the Benefits Data Trust, Matt Notowidigdo of Northwestern has secured records and permissions to run a randomized controlled trial on the uptake of benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Although there have been studies of SNAP before, none have been randomized controlled trials. The study calls for over 30,000 eligible seniors to be slated by chance for one of three treatments: the control group gets nothing special; a “low touch” group will receive information about enrolling; and the “high touch” group will also receive assistance with preparing the necessary paperwork. Researchers will then analyze the collected data about who actually enrolls. Funds from this grant will support Notowidigdo and his team in executing the experiment and analyzing the results. None of Notowidigdo’s efforts aim to address potentially ideological questions about the existence or generosity of SNAP or social welfare programs in general. Rather, the aim is to generate empirical economic evidence that will help economists test different theories about what factors drive uptake of social safety net programs and how such programs can be administered effectively and efficiently.

This grant provides two years of continued support for production of National Public Radio’s Planet Money podcast. Grant funds will help produce in-depth economic content to be disseminated via the Planet Money podcast and blog and on NPR’s All Things Considered, Morning Edition, NPR One, and This American Life. Additional funds will support the production of multimedia pieces to supplement and enhance the broadcast content on the web, a series of interactive “sound walks” that explore economic history, and several experiments in participatory journalism.

Funds from this grant support a three-pronged initiative by PRX, public radio’s largest distribution marketplace, to expand science-themed audio for radio broadcast and podcasting. First, PRX will continue to expand its Open Call for STEM stories, which last year generated more than 100 submissions from reporters and producers with compelling science stories to tell. Second, PRX will develop and support five new radio shows featuring women scientists and produced by women. Finally, PRX will incorporate science- and technology-themed episodes into its existing portfolio of popular programs, including The Moth Radio Hour, 99% Invisible, Theory of Everything, and Blank on Blank, which collectively reach several million listeners. With the runaway success of Serial in the past year, podcasts have hit a tipping point, and PRX is well positioned to harness this new energy and excitement. This project has the potential to engage an entirely new community of science storytellers, while advancing public understanding of science among the next generation of listeners.

Funds from this grant support two projects that aim to increase the participation of underrepresented minority (URM) students in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey collaboration. The first, the Faculty and Student Team (FAST) program creates research teams led by a faculty member and comprised of at least one URM graduate student and/or two to three advanced URM undergraduate students. Each FAST unit (faculty and students) is subsequently linked with a research team at a formal SDSS participating institution; the research team will help integrate them into the collaboration, providing a kind of double mentoring system: the SDSS institution mentors the URM FAST team, and the faculty lead mentors the participating URM students on the team. The goal is to provide these URM students with training and guidance within SDSS, anticipating that they will eventually transition to an astronomy Ph.D. program at an SDSS member university.  The second supported project is a distributed summer program that will provide research experiences for minority undergraduates. The 10-week program, to be run by New Mexico State University, will bring interested URM students from non-SDSS institutions to the home institution of SDSS researchers to facilitate one-on-one mentoring and exposure to the global SDSS collaboration. In addition to their direct SDSS mentor, students would have regular virtual check-ins with the other participants, an in-person kick-off meeting, and a culminating research meeting, likely held in conjunction with a formal SDSS collaboration meeting. Over time, the FAST and summer research programs have the potential to increase the participation of underrepresented minority doctoral students in astronomy programs nationwide.