This grant supports an initiative by Esther Duflo at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) to infuse more rigorous methodology into empirical economics. Mobilizing J-PAL’s formidable research and training programs, Duflo will promote practices such as preregistration of experiment plans; prepublication re-analysis of results; and open sharing of datasets, code, and supporting documentation. Funded activities include a series of graduate fellowships for economics students who work on enhancing reproducibility and the development with MIT of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on best economics research practices.

Funds from this grant provide three years of support for the continued development of QuantEcon.org, an online resource for code, data, tutorials, and lectures on quantitative economic modeling. The brainchild of economists John Stachurski of Australian National University and Thomas Sargent of New York University, QuantEcon provides open source modules for economists seeking to model a variety of economic phenomena, covering topics from asset pricing to optimal savings. Grant funds will support a variety of improvements to the site, including the addition of 20 new lectures, an innovative data portal, an open notebook archive, and expanded code libraries. Additional funds will support efforts to move the site toward independent sustainability and to connect its offerings to other economic research institutions. Funds for the development of QuantEcon have been granted to NUMFocus, a nonprofit organization that provides administrative, operational, and strategic support to scientific software projects.

This grant provides support to the Yale Program on Financial Stability (YPFS), a research and professional training program that exposes financial regulators to the best current theory and global practice in macroprudential regulation. Grant funds provide three years of support for the program’s summer school. Supported activities include a two-week Systemic Risk Symposium that brings regulators together with senior researchers to analyze past cases of regulatory intervention in such areas as asset crashes, liquidity crises, and the shadow banking sector; an academic conference on Fighting a Financial Crisis in which program participants serve as discussants of new, cutting-edge academic research; a Ph.D. dissertation workshop to expose students to regulatory datasets and career paths; and a Financial Crisis Forum that brings in highly regarded financial regulators like Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, Hank Paulson, and Stanley Fisher to discuss macroprudential regulation and the challenges and obstacles that stand in the way of effective regulatory intervention during financial crises.   Led by Professor Andrew Metrick, the Yale Program on Financial Stability is the only program of its kind. Its continued success holds the potential to build bridges between the academic and regulatory communities, spur further research, and equip the next generation of financial regulators with the tools they need to better fight future financial crises.

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Summer Institute is arguably the most important and influential annual event for empirical economists. This grant to NBER provides partial organizational and administrative funding for the Summer Institute for the next three years. The Summer Institute is a three-week academic festival. Over 2,400 economists participate in at least one of over 50 workshops. Directors of NBER’s 20 programs organize overlapping tracks that cover labor, aging, health, and other traditional subjects. In addition, special working groups meet at the Summer Institute to exchange ideas, discuss recent scholarly work, and identify promising new topics for study. Many prominent research results are first presented at the Institute, some in preliminary form that benefit from the intense discussion both during and after a workshop. There are also popular plenary sessions, such as the annual Feldstein Lecture and the Sloan-funded Methods Lecture. In addition to general support for the Institute, grant funds will be used to videotape sessions for wider distribution and for scholarships that underwrite the participation of emerging scholars from underrepresented groups.