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.

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.  

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.

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.

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.

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. 

This grant supports an ongoing NBER project, the International Social Security (ISS) project, led by Courtney Coile and Axel Bцrsch-Supan, that will examine a variety of retirement and social safety net reforms that have been implemented in other countries, including Canada, Japan, and nine European countries. Teams of investigators from 12 countries (11 mentioned above and the U.S) will examine the precise financial incentives associated with those reforms and the effects of the changed financial incentives on work, retirement, and claiming behavior at older ages. The studies will use a common template, which will enable meaningful, if complicated, comparisons across countries. While the institutional and cultural contexts differ across countries to various degrees, the commonality of demographic pressures and the limited scope of options for restoring financial sustainability to retirement programs make the experiences of other countries directly relevant to Social Security reform discussions in the United States. 

This grant funds follow-up research by Harvard’s Nicole Maestas in the aftermath of the 2015 American Working Conditions Survey (AWCS). The AWCS is alone among major workplace surveys in its attention to cataloging both the pecuniary and the nonpecuniary characteristics of jobs, which allows researchers to analyze how these characteristics shape older Americans’ decisions regarding working into later ages. In tandem with the AWCS, Maestas fielded a stated preference experiment designed to assess how much older workers value different job characteristics. Funds from this grant will allow Maestas to reconnect with survey participants three years after the original ACWS survey, allowing the collection of new data and enabling a clearer look into both how workplace characteristics shape retirement decisions and the dynamics of how worker preferences about the desirability of various workplace characteristics change over time. 

Our understanding of the size and characteristics of the alternative work force—freelance workers, contract workers, contingent workers, on-call workers, temporary workers, etc.—is severely limited by inadequate federal surveys. They are inadequate in several ways: lack of a clear and agreed upon taxonomy of work; questionable phrasing of questions; sporadic fielding of the surveys; and failure to take into account entirely new forms of work, often referred to as the gig economy, the platform economy, or the on-demand economy.   The U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is fielding its first Contingent Work Survey (CWS) in 10 years. This grant funds a project by Princeton economist Alan Krueger and Edward Freeland, Director of the Princeton Survey Research Center to identify and examine ways to improve the CWS questions in order to increase validity, reduce measurement error, and determine if new or additional categories of alternative work are needed.

Research shows a shifting balance of gains and losses in cognitive abilities throughout adulthood, with increases in experience-based knowledge and decreases in the ability to process new information quickly and efficiently. However, as is the case with much psychological research, little is known about how these ability changes manifest in daily life, including in the workplace. This grant supports a project by psychologist Margie Lachman and economist Adam Jaffe to study creative output over the life course by augmenting and analyzing a large dataset of more than two million patent holders. Lachman and Jaffe will use the dataset to examine such questions as the extent to which individuals are able to maintain or increase the quality and quantity of their innovative work, whether this varies by sector or gender, and whether teams that bring older and younger workers together are less or more creative than teams that are less age-diverse. This research will result in new knowledge and important insights for economists, psychologists, and other social scientists who are interested in how aging-related cognitive changes can affect innovation across life trajectories and across different types of teams. The creation of the new database will also facilitate further research.