Federal court records document over 30 million personal bankruptcy cases during the century since the U.S. passed its first permanent bankruptcy law in 1898. Storing and maintaining these records is expensive, however-the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts has been spending $2 million per year to keep about a million cubic feet of these paper records stored in boxes at Federal Records Centers in a dozen different regions-and efforts were recently announced to cut costs, possibly by disposing of all these records. Plans to discard this rich historical record naturally set off alarms among scholars of all sorts, from those studying gender and racial disparities, to those interested in business cycles. Researchers began to write about compelling projects that could only be completed using these bankruptcy records. Funds from this grant will support efforts by American University Professor Mary Hansen to work with the National Archive and Records Administration to create a research database from a statistically representative sample of these bankruptcy records, digitally preserving the data they contain for future use by scholars.

In July 2010, Carnegie Mellon professor Chester Spatt hosted a Foundation-supported conference on the industrial organization of credit ratings agencies - the industry responsible for evaluating the creditworthiness of financial instruments and products. The 80 conference participants composed a diverse crop of researchers, including economists, industry practitioners, government officials, and international experts. In addition to presentations on a number of important topics, including litigation risk, competition among rating firms, and regulatory challenges associated with securitization, the conference hosted a session on next steps, where attendees voiced enthusiasm for forming a research network, continuing annual conferences, compiling shared data, and increasing interaction with policymakers. Funds from this grant will support a project by Professor Spatt to develop just such an ongoing research network. Additional funds provide continued support for Professor Spatt's own work on developing sophisticated game theoretic models of the credit rating process, with an emphasis on potential biases introduced into the ratings process by the way firms purchase ratings sequentially and then decide which ratings to publish.

This grant to Susan Houseman of the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research supports ongoing efforts to study ways to improve the quality of federal statistics related to the effects of globalization and international trade flows on the U.S. economy and work with officials at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of economic analysis to develop practical strategies to correct biases or methodological flaws in current data collection practices. Funds from this grant will support the commissioning of several papers on federal data collection methodologies; an academic conference to be attended by economists, researchers, policymakers, and federal officials; a published volume of papers; and the development of concrete plans for improving how we understand and measure the effects of globalization on the U.S. economy.