Crises have a way of bringing out "every man for himself" instincts just when cooperation and coordination are most needed. This kind of thinking in 1930 resulted in America's Smoot-Hawley tariff. Its passage provoked the imposition of retaliatory tariffs by many other countries, reduced U.S. exports and imports by 50 percent, and, by most accounts, directly helped bring on the Great Depression. There is considerable reason, therefore, to avoid making similar mistakes in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis. Robert Feenstra and Alan Taylor are organizing a Global Forum for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) on the topic "Globalization in an Age of Crisis: Multilateral Economic Cooperation in the Twenty-First Century." The event, to be hosted by the Bank of England, is specifically designed to facilitate interaction among leading academics and policymakers from around the world, including existing Sloan Foundation grantees working on theoretical, historical, or institutional aspects of international economics. Participants will be expected not only to critique the research, data, and analyses presented, but also to formulate plans and initiatives for fostering multilateral economic cooperation in the wake of financial turmoil.

Policies instituted during the 2008 financial crisis may have averted total disaster, but many of these can also make matters worse if left in place. For example, the forced merging of banks now makes the "too big to fail" problem all the more vexing. The structural, regulatory, and institutional reforms needed to address such problems globally will be the subject of a book project led by Adam Posen, a Senior Fellow at the Peter G. Peterson Institute of International Economics. Those who have begun trying to imagine new structures for the banking and financial sector are, according to Posen, often hobbled by unproven myths about regulation, industrial organization, disclosure requirements, and the incentive systems for banks and bankers. Adam Posen is working on how to indentify, justify, and coordinate the implementation of new financial structures going forward, and funds from this grant provide necessary support for this ongoing work.

Engineers have been writing for years about how simple steps like home weatherization can save consumers considerable money. Relatively few consumers, however, take such simple, cost-saving steps. Among economists, this puzzling phenomenon is sometimes called the "Energy Efficiency Paradox." This grant will support the work of Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan and the "ideas42" research group he leads, as they pursue six related research projects, all grounded in empirical observation, studying how people make energy consumption and utilization decisions and what policy-relevant conclusions might be drawn from what is learned. The results may be surprising. In previous work with the company OPOWER, for example, Mullainathan's group found that giving consumers information about their neighbors' energy use had significantly greater impact than just providing information about their own energy consumption. Utility companies and federal agencies are presently spending huge amounts of money on energy efficiency and metering programs based on very little in the way of theory, evidence, or experiment. Together with a project manager and several research assistants funded through this grant, the team of outstanding economists, energy experts, psychologists, and marketers that make up "ideas42" are poised to make important contributions to our understanding of the "Energy Efficiency Paradox" and other apparent behavioral anomalies that can be observed when consumers make energy-related decisions.

The use of biopharmaceutical products has increased greatly over the past twenty years and is expected to continue to increase in volume and importance in years to come. Like many other manufacturing operations, there has been a substantial increase in the globalization of biopharmaceutical production within the last five to ten years. The FDA, the Government Accountability Office, and Congress are well aware of the challenges and tradeoffs involved when industries globalize, and in response the FDA has adjusted its inspection policies and practices. Funds from this grant will support a multidisciplinary team of researchers based at MIT's Center for Biomedical Innovation and led by Georgetown University Professor Jeffrey Macher, in their work to study how globalization has changed regulatory practice surrounding the production and distribution of biopharmaceuticals.

Multinational financial organizations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) can sometimes become insular, politicized, ponderous, and unaccountable. That is why Raghuram Rajan from the University of Chicago and Barry Eichengreen from the University of California, Berkeley, plan on establishing an independent "Council on International Monetary Reform" (CIMR) to monitor, advise, consult with, and critique the IMF. These two professors are among the world's most respected and engaged authorities on international financial and monetary economics. The CIMR will consist of fewer than 18 members representing a balanced variety of countries, ideologies, and economic approaches. The grant budget provides for a CIMR planning conference followed by three annual meetings. The Council will interact with senior IMF officials, with attendees at the main IMF meetings each fall, and with the media as well. Establishing this CIMR is just one component of the Sloan Foundation's developing initiative on international financial regulation. The goal of this entire initiative is to inform, prepare, and eventually institute significant reforms of the international financial and monetary system.

Surprisingly few ideas from the field of international economics have turned out to be useful either in the run-up to the recent financial upheaval or in its aftermath. To reinvigorate the field of international macroeconomics, Kristin Forbes of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Jeff Frankel of Harvard University are organizing a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) project on "The Global Financial Crisis." Pairing the two of them illustrates how their project, like everything NBER does, will be strictly non-partisan and aimed at developing fundamental understanding rather than explicit policy recommendation. For example, three basic research questions this project will concentrate on are: How did global imbalances contribute to the crisis? How was the crisis transmitted internationally? How has the global nature of the crisis affected macroeconomic policy ranging from fiscal and monetary policy to bank regulation and the role of the dollar? The plan is to issue a broad call for proposals to prepare and present papers on these topics, commission a dozen of the best submitted in the competitive solicitation, post them as working papers, and hold a pre-conference with assigned discussants to provide critiques. Refocusing and revitalizing research on international macroeconomics like this is just one component of the Sloan Foundation's developing initiative on international financial regulation. The goal of this entire initiative is to inform, prepare, and eventually institute significant reforms of the international financial and monetary system.

The "copyright clause" of the U.S. Constitution empowers Congress "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Digitization has made intellectual property issues like this so important that, for the first time, the President has appointed a "copyright czar" to serve in the White House. Students face huge fines for sharing songs over the Internet, for example. Incentives to create or share innovations appear threatened. And the proposed "Google Settlement" could (arguably) monopolize access to certain books, including "orphan works," as discussed at the recent meeting hosted by the Sloan Foundation on "Open Access and Dissemination of Knowledge" and a brief filed by the United States Department of Justice in the U.S. District Court reviewing the Settlement. How can research help? Whereas patenting has been studied extensively by legal scholars and economists, thorough theoretical and empirical analyses of copyright policy and its effects in the digital age remain yet to be done. To this end, Berkeley Professor of Economics, Law, and Public Policy-Suzanne Scotchmer-proposes to study the benefits, costs, and distributional consequences of potential solutions to a set of copyright problems. One is compulsory licensing by collective rights management organizations like Broadcast Music, Inc. (music performance rights) and the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. This project will help provide theoretical foundations for a Sloan Foundation initiative that will sponsor further theoretical, empirical, and interdisciplinary research on copyright policy and information goods.