This grant provides continued support for the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (BPEA) a series of conferences and journals that serve as premier outlets for impartial, nonpartisan, policy-relevant economic research. Over the next three years, grant funds will support organizational and administrative costs associated with the BPEA, including biannual meetings, commissioned papers, and a “Living Papers” series that allows research results to be updated in real time as new data becomes available.  Potential topics to be covered include household finance, macroeconomic dynamics, quantitative easing, and macroprudential regulation.

If those who discover new ideas could appropriate all the benefits, then, at least in principle, market mechanisms could efficiently determine investments in science. But private and collective incentives diverge in the presence of externalities. We just do not know in advance where, when, or for whom research results will become valuable. Because predicting or charging for such applications can be difficult, markets tend to underallocate and misallocate support for basic research. This grant funds research by a team led by Jason Owen-Smith to examine the return to investments in basic science by tracking how research grants eventually do and do not result in gainful applications. To collect, process, and study the detailed data necessary for carrying this out, Owen-Smith and his colleagues will establish an Institute for Research on Innovation and Science (IRIS) based at the University of Michigan.  Foundation funds will support data infrastructure at the University of Michigan, as well as infrastructure at the University of Chicago and Ohio State.

If those who discover new ideas could appropriate all the benefits, then, at least in principle, market mechanisms could efficiently determine investments in science. But private and collective incentives diverge in the presence of externalities. We just do not know in advance where, when, or for whom research results will become valuable. Because predicting or charging for such applications can be difficult, markets tend to underallocate and misallocate support for basic research. This grant supports efforts by economists Ufuk Akcigit of the University of Pennsylvania and Daron Acemoglu of Harvard University to study economic spillover effects associated with technological progress through the examination and modeling of innovation networks.  Using patent, citation, and other data, the team will construct new theoretical models of innovation spillovers, conduct detailed empirical analyses, and evaluate the counterfactual effects of various innovation policies.  Additional topics to be studied include the role of innovation policy in an open economy; the roots of major real-world innovations that led to significant spillovers; and the role networks play among inventors and financial institutions in generating spillovers.

This grant funds efforts by Micah Altman of MIT and Salil Vadhan of Harvard to develop practical tools that researchers and repositories can use to process private and proprietary data. The goal of the project is to provide workable procedures that improve the accessibility, reproducibility, and confidentiality of “big data” produced from a variety of sources.  Potential outputs include templates for legal agreements as well as software for depositing and accessing sensitive information. In addition, Altman, Vadhan, and their team plan to analyze the incentives and constraints on players throughout the system—from research funders to university administrators, and from potential data providers to academic publishers. For social scientists, working with personally identifiable data poses significant technical, administrative, and legal challenges.  Though the big data era has made these challenges increasingly ubiquitous, there is hardly anywhere to turn for reliable standards, precedents, or guidance.  This project aims to help rectify that pressing problem.