Funds from this grant support a conference organized by Glen Weyl and Eric Posner of the University of Chicago on “Benefit-Cost Analysis for Financial Regulation.” At the conference, economists, regulators, and lawyers will present and debate frameworks for evaluating government interventions in financial markets with the specific goal of catalyzing, collecting, and synthesizing the normative and quantitative research on the social welfare implications of rulemaking associated with the Dodd-Frank Act. Conference participants will represent a broad spectrum of practical and conceptual approaches to the issues at hand. Findings are scheduled to appear in a special issue of the Journal of Legal Studies. The hope is that such efforts can point the way toward more efficient, effective, and rational regimes for regulating the financial sector.

This grant to Yale University supports the planning and development of a new “Program on Financial Stability” aimed at training a new generation of experts on financial regulation. Led by Yale Finance and Management professor Andrew Metrick, the program will aim to translate and synthesize research on macroprudential regulation that speaks to practitioners; compile case studies containing raw data and documentation that describe the interaction between regulation and firm behavior; train early-career scholar-regulators employed by major national and international agencies; and help build an international community of scholars, regulators, and financial experts. If successful, the program promises to provide an invaluable training resource that responds to the need to develop the human, social, and intellectual capital that financial regulators need to fend off future financial crises.

The grant provides support for a project headed by Yale biologist Jo Handelsman to find targeted interventions that to increase equitable decision-making and overcome the effects of explicit and implicit gender bias in the many review processes that are an essential part of academic science. Leading a multidisciplinary team, Handelsman will conduct two experiments comparing interventions designed to mitigate explicit bias, implicit bias, or both (hybrid). Depending on which intervention is found to be most effective, the team will then develop, evaluate, and distribute a training guide, and publish their results. Prospective audiences for the training guide include faculty, staff, and students in campus diversity training settings; graduate students in “responsible conduct of research” courses; faculty search committees; and senior academic administrators responsible for university personnel practices.

InsideSchools.org is a comprehensive source of information on New York City schools visited by over 140,000 students, parents, educators, and members of the public each month. Its user-friendly website offers detailed profiles of New York’s 1,700 schools, including in-class videos, student achievement statistics, and insights gained from on-site visits. News and advice columns also cover everything from entrance tests to new administrative appointments. To ensure access by diverse demographic groups, the entire site can be immediately translated into 50 different languages. The Sloan Foundation has supported InsideSchools since its inception in 2002.Funds from this grant support efforts by InsideSchools to expand its offerings by providing information about the different pedagogical and curricular offerings at each school, such as Everyday Math, TERC, Saxon, Singapore, or Montessori. In a separate effort to improve data quality, InsideSchools will also begin consulting with a statistician to help separate school effects from small sample biases or other confounding variables.

This grant provides two years of support for a new awards program by the Council for Economic Education (CEE) that honors exceptional, innovative K-12 teaching of economics and finance in the New York Metropolitan Area. These “Economic Educator of the Year Awards” will be awarded by a distinguished independent committee to three K-12 teachers based on evidence of their creativity, general effectiveness, and success at motivating underserved students.Winners will be honored at the CEE annual dinner, where a video will also be shown that highlights their achievements and showcases their teaching methods. Each winner receives a $5,000 prize and their schools will receive $2,500 to strengthen its economic education offerings.

The published research literature on any given topic likely represents a highly unrepresentative sample of all that is known. That is because authors and editors are rarely interested in publishing ambiguous or disconfirming results concerning a given hypothesis. Such “publication bias” creates vexing problems when performing formal meta-analyses, or whenever anyone tries to interpret the results of a body of empirical work.Suppose, however, that investigators could agree to collect and post public commitments to their research plans, including their hypotheses and methodologies, in advance of collecting all their data. Not only could simple transparency like this go a long way toward alleviating publication bias, it could also deter other ways researchers have of cherry picking and distorting results.This grant funds a project by the American Economic Association (AEA) to bring just such a thing about. Led by MIT economist Esther Duflo, the AEA will set up a national registry for randomized controlled trials in economics. By linking study designs to related datasets and by making study details more easily searchable, the proposed registry would advance the Foundation’s efforts to promote communication, transparency, and best practices among scholarly researchers.

This grant supports the production, broadcast, and promotion of four primetime science-themed documentaries by the popular PBS series, American Experience. Supported documentaries include Edison, about the life and enormous scientific contributions of the famed American inventor; Penn Station, about the ambitious engineering marvel that brought the Pennsylvania Railroad’s tunnels and trains under the Hudson River and into Manhattan; Tuberculosis, about the rise and fall of the most lethal disease in American history; and The Great Fire, about the 1910 wildfire that burned three million acres across Washington, Idaho, and Montana and subsequently gave rise to the conservation movement, the establishment of the U.S. Forest Service, and the battle between Roosevelt and the railroad barons to establish a public, scientifically managed system of national forests. Additional funds from this grant support the development of an interactive mobile app, the Engineering Map of America, that will offer entertaining and educational walking tours of select engineering sites across the country.

This grant supports a project led by Richard Morgenstern of the nonpartisan think tank Resources for the Future (RFF) to study the effects of specific regulations governing food safety, industrial water pollution, air toxics, and municipal water pollution. Morgenstern will also commission up to six additional regulatory assessments by outside academics whose research techniques meet high scientific criteria. The studies will focus not only on the evaluation of the specific regulations themselves, but on how new datasets and measurement capabilities can improve regulatory design and support more effective regulatory assessment. Results will be disseminated through a formal report and workshop targeted at relevant stakeholders in the government, academic, and NGO communities, and through a series of online outreach activities.

Funds from this grant support efforts by a team led by Stephen Flynn, Professor of Political Science at Northeastern University to hold a series of four workshops to help guide the rapid and sustained recovery of the metro New York City region in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.  The four workshops will bring together emergency managers, urban planners, and academic experts from coastal cities and the New York region to facilitate the exchange of findings and recommendations on how best to incorporate resilience into the current regional restoration efforts and future planning.  The first three workshops will focus on three sectors where Sandy caused considerable disruption in the metro New York area—transportation, energy, and health services.  Each workshop will aim to identify recommendations for what should be in place to mitigate future risk, what can be done to speed up recovery of these sectors, and to identify crosscutting issues amongst them.  The fourth workshop will take place at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and will involve representatives from the insurance, reinsurance, and banking industries.  The goal of this workshop will be to identify meaningful incentives that can be devised for advancing measures that can bolster resilience.  In addition to the workshops, Flynn and his team will engage in a number of outreach activities to publicize their findings, including the publication of several reports, meetings with relevant stakeholders, and a series of high profile op-eds and media appearances.

Funds from this grant provide three years of continued support to New York City’s Ensemble Studio Theatre (EST) for the creation and development of new American plays that explore scientific or technological themes or feature scientists, engineers, or mathematicians as major characters. EST will commission between ten and twenty new plays per year from emerging and established playwrights, stage a production of a science-themed play annually, and host the First Light Festival, an annual month-long celebration of science-themed plays that includes panels, workshops, and staged readings of plays in development.