Funds from this grant continue support to the Macro Finance Society (MFS) a group of prominent scholars in economics and finance who first came together in 2013 to advance the development of macroeconomic models that incorporate our best thinking about the interaction between the real economy and the financial sector. Grant funds will support a host of related activities over the next two years, including a series of biannual workshops and associated outreach activities, the development of a lasting repository for relevant data and code, the creation of a long-term financial sustainability plan for the society, and operational funds to offset the professional research and travel of members.

Funds from this grant support the establishment of three University Centers of Exemplary Mentoring: one at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; one at the University of California, San Diego; and one at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. These centers will aim to increase the diversity of underrepresented minorities in STEM graduate education through providing fellowships, peer and faculty mentoring, professional development, and various other services to STEM graduate students from traditionally underrepresented groups. Together, the three new grants will fund $40,000 scholarships to 61 Sloan UCEM Scholars over the course of three years. In addition, the three universities will provide full packages (tuition, stipend, fees) to these 61 UCEM Scholars and to 61 UCEM Institutional Match (IM) students. Additional funds will support a host of activities at the UCEMs aimed at helping minority students succeed in their graduate studies. The National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering administers the program, disburses funds to the Sloan UCEM Scholars and universities, reports on student progress and finances, and monitors and enforces policies on student eligibility, nomination, expenditure rules, and time-to-degree expectations.

Each year since 1973, the Sloan Public Service Awards have recognized six outstanding civil servants out of the hundreds of thousands of people who work for New York City government. The Fund for the City of New York manages the nomination and selection process and refers to the awards as “the Nobel Prizes of Government…, the highest award that can be bestowed upon a New York City public servant.” Nominated by their colleagues and selected by a blue-ribbon panel of distinguished New Yorkers, each of the six winners receives a $10,000 cash prize and is honored at individual celebrations at their workplaces and at a city-wide celebration presided over by the Mayor. This grant provides three years of continued support for the Sloan Public Service Awards.

The Doctoral Scholars Program (DSP) of the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) sponsors the Compact for Faculty Diversity’s Institute for Teaching and Mentoring (Institute), the largest gathering of minority doctoral students in the country. The yearly institute brings minority students together to help provide young scholars with the resources they need to succeed in graduate study and in their future careers in academia. In addition, the Institute provides scholars opportunities to meet one another, share knowledge, and discuss common problems and strategies to overcome them. The gathering is an effective and efficient gathering point for all those in the Sloan Minority Ph.D. (MPHD) program, including Sloan Scholars, program directors, program administrators, and faculty, as well as staff from Sloan and its administrative partners: the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering and the Social Sciences Research Council. The number of Sloan participants has grown to over 15 percent of total attendees in the past three years, and the Institute totals now routinely exceed 1,000 per year. This grant provides four years of support to the Southern Regional Education Board to defray costs associated with hosting the Institute.

This grant supports a project by Harvard University’s Department of Economics, in partnership with the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) and economists in other Harvard schools (e.g., the Kennedy School of Government and the School of Public Health), to support 24 “student-years-worth” of post-baccalaureate training in mathematics and economics for very promising underrepresented minority (URM) students. Resources available to students through the program will include a paid research assistant position with a participating Harvard faculty member, up to four courses per year of undergraduate or graduate coursework, access to one of the math boot camps taken by entering graduate students in Harvard’s economics Ph.D. program, support for GRE preparation, travel funds to attend conferences; and peer and faculty mentoring. The project aims to increase the number of Ph.D. graduates in economics and related fields by 8 to 10 percent, and to serve as a model for other universities and institutions interested in increasing the representation of minorities within economics or other scientific fields.

This grant provides two years of continued support for the administration of the Sloan Teaching Champion Awards, an annual awards program run by the Council for Economic Education that recognizes outstanding financial and economics education by secondary school teachers in the New York City metropolitan area. Winners are selected by an independent committee based on a number of diverse factors, including their effectiveness, creativity, and success in motivating underserved students. Winners receive a $5,000 cash prize, $2,500 to be used to augment economic education programs at their respective schools, and are honored at a high-profile event in New York City.

This grant supports a research project by economists Jay Battacharya (Stanford Medical School), Jon Levin (Stanford), Liran Einav (Stanford), and Amy Finkelstein (MIT) to use newly available datasets to compare the cost and performance of Medicare and Medicare Advantage to private insurance plans that cover similarly situated consumers. The team will examine a broad range of questions relevant to health care policy by comparing data on public insurance plan performance provided by the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services with newly available data on private plan performance compiled by the Health Care Cost Institute. Issues to be examined include the differences in health care costs, services, and prices in public and private plans; what features of public or private plan structure account for these differences; and whether private insurance plans can or do deliver comparable outcomes to Medicare at lower costs.

Any given research protocol entails a trade-off between privacy and accuracy. At one extreme, locking up data so no one can use it gives privacy but no accuracy or utility. At the other, fully open data provides plenty of accuracy and utility, but no privacy. In between are other protocols—like ones using fully homomorphic encryption, multiparty secure computation, or differential privacy—that provide differing combinations of accuracy and privacy. Together, one can imagine all these protocols forming a production possibility set. This grant supports a project by Cornell economist John Abowd to characterize the “efficient frontier” of such protocols. These are ones with the property that no other conceivable protocol could deliver more accuracy without sacrificing some privacy, or more privacy without sacrificing some accuracy. After assembling a library of such protocols, Abowd and his team will explore and measure public attitudes among these protocols and the tradeoffs, helping us understand public preferences toward the tradeoffs between accuracy and privacy.

The grant funds a collaboration between PBS's American Masters series and Reframed Pictures, a new production company founded by actress Susan Sarandon, to produce a 90-minute documentary about Hedy Lamarr. The show, with Richard Rhodes as the primary technology advisor and Rhodes's Sloan-supported book Hedy's Folly as the primary text, will focus on Lamarr's pioneering invention of frequency hopping—the basis for cell phones, GPS, and Wi-Fi technology—as well as Lamarr's colorful life and her renown as a glamorous Hollywood actress whose fame and beauty obscured her landmark contributions as an inventor.

Funds from this grant support the production of four science- and technology-themed documentaries to be broadcast by The American Experience, the longest running and most successful history series on television. Supported episodes include Nikola Tesla, a two-hour special about the visionary inventor of the alternating current electric supply system and radio control technology who forecast the Internet, solar power, and military drones. The documentary will draw on the recently published Sloan-supported biography by Bernard Carlson, which contains original research about Tesla's technological training and a wealth of detail about his endless inventions, both successes and failures; The Race Underground about the great engineering challenge to build the first subway and transform urban transit told via the competition between brothers Henry and William Whitney, one in New York and one in Boston; and The Aeronauts, a fascinating little-known tale of the Air Force researchers and test pilots who paved the way for the U.S. space program by testing the limits of the human body in the upper reaches of the atmosphere. The topic of the fourth show is yet to be determined. Additional grant funds will support marketing, advertising, and promotion of the episodes, both on air and online; an active social media campaign; and targeted outreach to communities and organizations with a specific interest in these subjects.