This grant renews support to Howard University for an ongoing project to strengthen its economics department and bolster its research capacity. Howard is the only Historically Black College or University with an economics doctoral program and one of just 20 granting both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics. Grant funds will be used to increase Howard’s capacity to recruit, educate, and graduate students through providing tuition support for 8 doctoral students and research stipend support for 1 postdoctoral scholar, 5 undergraduates, and 5 graduate students.  Other grant funds for faculty professional development will target roughly 10 early- and mid-career faculty members, offering opportunities to attend key conferences, seminars, workshops, and other activities. Taken together, the efforts aim to 1) elevate the impact and influence of Howard University within the field of economics; 2) cultivate a more resilient and extensive research standing; and 3) increase the number of diverse Ph.D. economists and educators.

In 2022, the Sloan Economics Program funded three postdoctoral fellowships at the National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER) for scholars studying racial and ethnic disparities in economic outcomes. This grant renews Sloan support for three more appointments during 2025-2028. Each fellow will spend a year at the NBER’s Cambridge headquarters pursuing their research agenda, interacting with NBER scholars, and participating in professional activities throughout the Boston area. Each will also benefit from mentoring by a senior professor who shares their research interests and who will arrange training and networking opportunities. To facilitate interaction and foster a sense of community, fellows will be invited and funded to attend the NBER Summer Institute in subsequent years. The distinguished Selection Committee—led by PI Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato (Stanford)—includes Trevor Logan (Ohio State), Jim Poterba (MIT), and Ebonya Washington (Columbia). They are looking for potential to contribute to the scientific analysis of racial and ethnic disparities in economic outcomes, with priority given to recruiting candidates from diverse backgrounds. Promising research areas include racial and ethnic differences in family structure, socioeconomic status and health care access, and experiences with the criminal justice system, and the extent to which discrimination and neighborhood effects contribute to these disparities.

What can science funders like Sloan do differently to produce more scientific breakthroughs? There is consensus among scientists, for example, that funders do not take enough risks and that grant-seeking is so unduly onerous that it can distort their incentives. Are they correct? What difference does it make? Economists are not only working to find out, but also to devise and test new mechanisms that can improve grant-making. The results get better when economists, scientists, and science funders all interact before, during, and after these studies take place. To accomplish that, there are few places better than the Science of Science Funding (SoSF) meetings at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Summer Institute, which attracts participants from major private funding institutions, government funding agencies, and organizations like USPTO, the U.S. Census Bureau, Science Magazine, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Co-PIs Reinhilde Veugelers and Megan MacGarvie will lead the next phase of SoSF, with goals that include: promoting a more focused research agenda; strengthening ties between economists and the institutions they study; and engaging more graduate students and early-career faculty in the community. They will organize more than half a dozen meetings over the next three years, including annual sessions at the NBER Summer Institute, annual NBER meetings on the Scientific Workforce, and a stand-alone “stock-taking” conference for science funders. Proceedings from this major conference will be published as a curated volume designed to make widely accessible the key results and open questions from the economics of science funding literature to date. The PIs will also lead site visits to scientific research facilities, organize workshops and dissertation feedback sessions for PhD students, and establish a small travel grants program to enable early-career researchers to visit the scientific organizations or science funders they intend to study

The Innovation Growth Lab (IGL) is a global collaboration that enables, supports, undertakes, and disseminates experimental research about the design of programs and institutions for promoting economic growth through innovation. Since 2014, IGL has launched more than 70 field experiments in 28 countries with the cooperation of more than 35 government agencies. Rigorous findings so far concern everything from the effectiveness of “innovation vouchers” for small and medium businesses to the importance of role models in promoting diversity among entrepreneurs. In the U.S., partners like the Economic Development Administration, Small Business Administration, and NASA have begun working with IGL to meet their obligations under the bipartisan Foundations of Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018.Over the next three years, IGL’s new initiatives will both strengthening such connections in the United States specifically, as well as providing even more services and activities to support the global community of experimentalists studying science, innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth. A major IGL undertaking will be to take over the organization of the Conference on Field Experiments in Strategy (CFXS), an annual and significant conference that attracts more than 350 leading scholars from all over the world.Plans include the addition of special workshops and seed grants for the many PhD candidates and early career scholars who attend CFXS in search of help with conducting their first field experiments. Randomized Controlled Trials can be particularly challenging to design and administer. Because they are often large-scale, time consuming, and expensive, too, nobody wants to discover in the middle of running such an experiment that they forgot about some crucial consideration or variable. That is one of the reasons why the work of organizations like IGL is so valuable.

This grant is supports the core operations of an emerging interdisciplinary energy research hub in the Environmental Markets Lab, also known as emLab, based in the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). This grant will help to advance emLab’s core activities in both project management and research capacities. Part of the funding will go towards hiring a new energy and climate project manager and helping existing staff to refresh and formalize emLab’s suite of project management tools. Lessons learned from implementing these project management activities will be disseminated throughout the research community. Funding will also support two emLab research projects on energy and distributional equity and is being conducted in partnership with the California Air Resources Board (CARB). The first research project focuses on the unequal distribution of energy burdens in California. The intention is to assess differences among household energy expenditures along socio-demographic dimensions. The second project takes a broader, national view and explores the equity implications of electricity sector decarbonization. It will do so by identifying and analyzing regional pollution concentrations due to different forms of electricity production. Researchers will then assess differences in emissions and pollution associated with a range of alternative energy system decarbonization policies. Each research project is expected to result in at least one publication.

This funding supports the administration of a series of small grants emerging from a new Scialog conference series, conducted in partnership with the Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA). Scialog conferences bring together early-career faculty from different disciplines to develop cutting-edge ideas for research projects that have the potential to grow and expand over time, with discussions guided by senior subject matter experts. This conference series is titled Sustainable Minerals, Metals, and Materials (SM3), and will address issues such as the role of critical minerals and metals in the clean energy transition, synthetic material production, waste disposal and recycling, and life-cycle analysis. The SM3 Scialog series is expected to run for three years, with meetings planned for 2024-2026, and will involve collaboration with other funders as well. At each Scialog conference, participants form collaborative teams and prepare brief proposals for seed grant funding, which are subsequently reviewed by senior researchers and a handful selected for support. This grant will support 10 awards to SM3 Scialog Fellows resulting from the 2024 conference, with each Fellow receiving $66,000 to support their project.

Global factors play a major role in influencing which decarbonization policies are considered by US policymakers and how those policies are implemented. The last few years have seen a host of issues emerge on this front: the push for greater economic protectionism, wars and conflicts that have destabilized energy markets, and the growing recognition that the impacts from climate change will impact economic growth patterns for decades to come. These matters are highly timely and relevant for contemporary energy policymaking in the United States, and have spurred discussion, for example, of establishing a carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) that would tax carbon-intensive goods entering the country or exploring how recent turbulence in oil and gas markets might influence investment in clean energy technologies. Funds from this grant support efforts at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) to advance research on the interplay between energy system decarbonization, international trade, and macroeconomics. NBER will hold two open calls for papers on these topics: one in 2024 on energy and trade, and one in 2025 on energy and macroeconomics. Eight research papers are expected to be supported per call, for a total of sixteen. In addition to the calls, grant funds will support two conferences for each call, a pre-conference to share initial ideas, methodologies, and research design, and a second conference to share results and findings with scholars and policymakers. Participating faculty will be asked to nominate graduate students to participate in the conferences, as a way to more closely connect these early-career researchers with NBER.

Sustainable hydrogen has emerged in recent years as a promising contributor in clean energy transitions for its potential to help decarbonize multiple sectors. Scholars are increasingly envisioning numerous uses for cleanly-produced hydrogen, including industrial heat, energy storage, or grid-balancing demand response. Recent work, however, has indicated that hydrogen might itself be an indirect greenhouse gas, with hydrogen emissions potentially increasing warming and therefore offsetting its expected climate benefits. As we begin a national build out of clean hydrogen infrastructure, it is vital to understand potential sources and magnitudes of hydrogen emissions along the supply chain so we can prepare for and address these issues at the outset, instead of having to mitigating these impacts through retrofits down the line. This grant funds the preliminary stages of a major research project by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) to conduct a multi-sector, collaborative hydrogen emissions field measurement campaign to better quantify hydrogen emissions across the full hydrogen value chain. Led by Ramón Alvarez, Associate Chief Scientist at EDF, and working closely with partners at West Virginia University and Transport Energy Strategies, EDF will collect hydrogen emissions data from real-world hydrogen fueling stations, including both gaseous and liquid fueling infrastructure, and vehicles, focusing primarily on heavy-duty vehicles like trucks, buses, and forklifts. The team will deploy two new measurement devices, a hydrogen full-flow sampling system, to be used for hydrogen emissions measurement at fueling stations, and the hydrogen portable emissions measurement system, to be used for vehicle emissions testing. These measurement devices will integrate a fine-resolution hydrogen sensor that will allow the project team to measure hydrogen emissions at concentrations that are too low to be a safety concern—and thus are below the measurement threshold of existing sensors—but that, collectively, might aggregate to have climate impacts. The team will use their results to develop some of the first estimates of hydrogen emissions in the transportation sector. In addition to publishing their findings in scholarly journals, EDF will release a publicly available hydrogen emission inventory, which will include the team’s field campaign results and will continue to be expanded as EDF’s larger hydrogen campaign progresses and expands.