Funds from this grant support the extension of a fellowship program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) that places behavioral and social scientists in government agencies to help the government implement innovative and evidence-based policies that promote better decision making by citizens and better performance by government.  AAAS’s existing fellowship program supports one fellow, placed at the Office of Science and Technology policy.  Funds from this grant will enable that fellowship to continue while adding an additional fellow in 2014 and one in 2015.

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.

This grant supports the development and organization of two four-day conferences that aim to build consensus within the social scientific community around the need for better data sharing and transparency and to investigate and discuss new approaches for doing so. Berkeley economist Edward Miguel, Director of the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences, will develop and host the conferences, to be held in the summers 2014 and 2015, and will focus on developing common transparency standards for academic publishers and on training early-career social scientists in best practices when conducting empirical research. Additional grant funds support a series of small grants for innovative student demonstration projects to increase adoption of more transparent research practices.

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Summer Institute is arguably the most important and influential annual event for empirical economists. For three weeks, more than 2,000 economists convene to participate in at least one of more than 50 workshops covering issues in labor economics, aging, health and other traditional subjects. This grant provides three years of continued support to NBER for the administration of the Summer Institute. In addition to defraying administrative expenses, funds support special methodological lectures at the Institute, the videotaping of sessions for wider distribution, and scholarships that underwrite the participation of emerging scholars from underrepresented groups.

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.

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.