In 1967, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) was passed by Congress with the intent to “promote employment of older persons based on their ability rather than age; to prohibit arbitrary age discrimination in employment.” While it has been viewed as successful in increasing employment rates for older workers, research suggests that older worker stereotypes and age discrimination still persist—or at least the perception of this discrimination still exists. Age-related charges of discrimination brought forward to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) have been on the increase. Whilst that may be the case, there has not been systematic examination of these charges.This grant funds work by a team led by Sarah Von Schrader of Cornell University that combines descriptive analyses with model-based approaches to better understand the phenomenon of perceived age-discrimination in the workplace. The study will look at a number of factors, including the characteristics of ADEA charges, charging parties, and employers receiving charges over time; individual and contextual factors associated with the outcomes of ADEA charges; and the characteristics of employers, along with local labor market factors, associated with ADEA charges. Von Schrader and her team will use restricted access data sets from the EEOC in conducting this research. By developing a better understanding of perceived discrimination in the workplace, it will be possible to better identify policies and practices to mitigate such discrimination.

This grant funds work by economic historian Claudia Goldin and labor economist Lawrence Katz to understand how education, employment, marriage, fertility, and health events from college to mid-life shape employment and retirement later in life among college-educated women. Goldin and Katz will study cohorts born from the mid-1930s to the early 1960s and that entered college from around 1950 to 1980. These cohorts, born up to 30 years apart, will provide sharp contrasts and differences in early, late, or no marriage; types of subjects majored in college; work patterns and whether they were intermittent or continuous; and if and when they had children. All of these factors contribute to how long college-educated women remain in the labor force and under what conditions. While existing research examines distinct cohorts of women, this will be the first study to link systematically the older, younger, and transitional cohorts.In addition to peer-reviewed articles and research papers, the project team will organize a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) conference and produce an NBER volume on women working longer.

This grant provides two years of continued support to the Science Festival Foundation for development and production of the World Science Festival, a week-long celebration of all that is fun and fascinating about science. Held each year in New York City, the Festival brings together scientific luminaries, technologists, artists, tastemakers, and the public for a series of panels, lectures, demonstrations, exhibitions, and educational events that aim to make manifest how engagement with science is as indispensable to a rich life as other cultural mainstays like music, theater, and literature. Grants funds support the production of the 2014 and 2015 World Science Festivals; additional scientific programming to be produced year-round; expanded educational programming focused on reaching students; expansion of the Festival’s web offerings to enable participation for those outside New York; and the development and implementation of a long-term sustainability plan for the Festival.

The grants supports the work of a team led by Karen Palmer at Resources for the Future to try advance our understanding of the “energy efficiency paradox”, the puzzling phenomenon of consumers failing to adopt energy efficient technologies even when they will save both energy and money over the long run. Palmer and her team will focus on two specific research questions related to how information affects consumer behavior. First, do home energy audits fill an important information gap in homeowner’s awareness of energy efficiency costs and savings? Second, how do city ordinances that require the disclosure and benchmarking of energy use by owners of commercial and multifamily residential buildings affect rents, occupancy, and landlord investments in efficiency improvements?The project will produce two rich new datasets about home energy audits.  One is a survey of 1,600 households across 23 states.  Over 500 of these households will have had an energy audit recently.  The survey instrument explores topics that existing panels do not, such as salience, defaults, and other behavioral economics considerations; time and other nonmonetary transaction costs; and tests of recommendation recall by homeowners.  The second dataset will be administrative information from audit providers describing the services, recommendations, and follow-ups provided to each of their customers.  Grants funds will support data collection, analysis, and the dissemination of findings to the academic community and the public.

This grant supports efforts by William Kerr of the Harvard Business School and Sara Turner of the University of Virginia to establish a research network focusing on advancing theoretical and empirical research on high-skilled immigration. Over the next three-and-a-half years, the new research center will convene leading experts from labor economics, international trade, industrial organization, education, and other fields; develop a compelling research agenda; and publish the results of their work. Supported activities include an ongoing series of workshops, conferences, and panels; honoraria and travel expenses for researchers; funds for data acquisition; and fellowship support for one post-doctoral and three pre-doctoral scholars.

Funds from this grant provide salary and administrative support for a full-time on-air and online multimedia storyteller working at National Public Radio’s (NPR) Science Desk. The new position, originally funded with Sloan support in 2012 as a one-year experiment, is tasked with enhancing NPR’s scientific coverage by supplementing traditional reporting with original animations, blog posts, illustrations, infographics, and video content, bringing NPRs high-quality reporting to new, digital audiences. This grant provides two years of bridge funding for the position after which it is anticipated NPR will incorporate the position into its yearly operating budget.

The grant provides partial support to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to expand its influential Abdul Lateef Jameel-Poverty Action Laboratory (J-PAL), creating a sister network focused on the use of randomized controlled trials to study economic issues in North America. Led by economists Amy Finkelstein of MIT and Lawrence Katz of Harvard, the new network, J-PAL North America, will build a cadre of researchers devoted to the rigorous empirical study of questions important to the formation of public policy across a variety of issues, including crime, health, and poverty. Finkelstein, Katz and their team will build a shared administrative data platform to be used by network researchers; provide seed funding to help launch promising or innovative research projects; establish a central clearinghouse to match researchers with government or other institutional partners; and provide a centralized training program for the conduct of randomized controlled trials and policy evaluations. Other funded activities include the review and synthesis of existing evidence-based literature; the production of policy briefs for policymakers and other interested stakeholders; and the development of several “evidence workshops” to communicate with policymakers, potential donors, activists, and social entrepreneurs.

Funds from this grant support an ambitious project by a team at Chrinon Limited to create an open access database that compiles information about legally recognized corporate entities, pulling information from dozens of public databases around the globe in the effort to identify the ownership, legal structure, and other features of every corporation, partnership, conglomerate, subsidiary, and holding company in the world. A small pilot grant from the Sloan Foundation launched the project in 2012 and the Chrinon team has made significant progress since then. The project website, OpenCorporates.com, already contains information on more than 65 million legal entities spanning more than 31 countries, all of which can be freely accessed academics, regulators, and the public. Grants funds will support the continued operation and expansion of OpenCorporates, including the collection of information about corporate court proceedings, regulatory filings, and licenses.

This grant provides partial support to the for the development and broadcast of a major, fact-based dramatic television series about how the Civil War led to major advances in medical science, including spurring innovations in emergency medicine, surgery, and epidemiology.  The bloodiest armed conflict in U.S. history, the Civil War claimed two lives from infection and disease for every life lost to injury or gunshot wound.  The series will depict historical figures like Dr. Jonathan Letterman, the father of battlefield medicine who developed the ambulance corps and the three stage evacuation system still in use today.  Other characters will include Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross; Dr. W.W. Keen, a celebrated neurosurgeon; and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Edward Squibb.  These figures will provide dramatic examples of how the exigencies created by the need to treat wounded and dying soldiers led to pioneering advances in trauma care, anesthesia, neurosurgery, plastic and reconstructive surgery, and prosthetics.

Funds from this grant support the work of chemists Paul Ziemann and Jose-Luis Jimenez of the University of Colorado Boulder to improve our fundamental scientific understanding of the basic chemistry of aerosols in indoor environments. Using state-of-the-art instrumentation and methodology, Ziemann and Jimenez will measure the chemical composition of unperturbed and aged gases, aerosol particles, and surfaces in two to three homes and buildings; conduct laboratory studies of gases, aerosols, and surface films formed from reactions of organic chemicals commonly found in indoor air and on human occupants with O3 and NO3 radicals, water, and acids; and begin to develop theoretical models that explain these chemical reactions.Because environmental chemistry to date has focused virtually exclusively on the reactions taking place outdoors, the supported research fills a lacuna in our scientific understanding of the world.