The study of markets for mortgages, credit cards, annuities, and other consumer financial products was neither organized nor widely recognized as an academic research field of its own before the subprime mortgage crisis began in 2007. Since then, the Sloan Foundation has staked out a coherent role in helping establish such a field by funding research on topics that range from retirement planning to energy efficient home improvement investments. Funds from this grant will provide continued support to one of the main components of Sloan's strategy for advancing the study of consumer financial product : The Household Finance Working Group (Working Group) based at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Launched in December 2009, the Household Finance Working Group organizes workshops, hosts conferences, and commissions research on the economics of household finance. Activities funded through this grant include two conferences, one to be held in Washington to provide policy perspectives, and another to be held jointly with the Sloan/Russell Sage Working Group on Behavioral Economics and Consumer Financial Markets. Also supported are attempts to build up the field of household finance by expanding support for research projects conducted by graduate students and young faculty.

When scientists and engineers immigrate to the United States, is it an important and enabling enhancement for our high-tech economy, or does it discourage and displace natives who would otherwise fill the jobs that these foreigners take? There is no shortage of entrenched views and vehement arguments on all sides of such questions. Though very little reputable research had been done on this subject not so many years ago, now immigration policy for highly skilled workers has become a controversial and polarizing topic among both politicians and academics. What is needed are dispassionate empirical studies of how the immigration of highly skilled workers can affect wages, employment, innovation, and productivity. This grant will support the work of Sari and William Kerr, rare examples of immigration researchers who are themselves highly skilled, but who are not readily associated with any political, methodological, or ideological camps. Rather, they have a reputation for working with interesting data, then letting the results fall where they may and speak for themselves. Their research under this grant will make pioneering use of sophisticated datasets that have only recently become available, including the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) files now maintained by the U.S. Census Bureau. Their work will be the first study of highly skilled immigration based on data and analysis at the firm level. The project will also address the question of whether firms are substituting younger highly skilled immigrants for older highly skilled native workers.

Funds from this grant provide support to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) to holds its annual Summer Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The NBER Summer Institute has become the most important meeting of its kind in the world, attracting, in recent years, nearly 2,000 participants over the course of four weeks to present and discuss the latest empirical research in all fields of economics. This makes the Summer Institute one of the best platforms to highlight and publicize Sloan Foundation research activities in economics and finance. More than 40 different Institute workshops are scheduled to overlap in ways that facilitate interactions among related fields and researchers and special efforts are being instituted to include a younger and more diverse crowd in addition to established scholars. The 400 or so papers presented are available online both to participants and to other researchers. Recent Institute programs specifically developed with Sloan support have focused on the financial crisis generally and on credit rating agencies in particular. Core support provided by this grant will not only fund participation in workshops, it will also help carry forward innovations such as the prestigious Feldstein Lectures, methodological courses, and a new workshop on the "Conduct of Research."

The digitization of information on a massive scale challenges many traditional assumptions about how media markets, intellectual property laws, innovation, governance, and other important aspects of our world can or should work. Adjustments taking place due to advances in digital information technology are rapid, significant, unfinished, and little studied by objective academics as opposed to interested stakeholders. This grant to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), supports efforts to establish an impartial community of scholars dedicated to studying the determinants and consequences of digitization. Activities funded through this grant divide into three broad categories: the development an economic framework for analyzing the effects of changes in and diffusion of digital information technology that is theoretically grounded and empirically relevant; the application of such a framework to the systematic evaluation of policy and governance issues; and the improvement of measures of the extent, impact, and potential for the diffusion and use of digital information technology through providing datasets that researchers can share. Funds from this grant will support annual workshops at the NBER Summer Institute, winter outreach meetings with practitioners and a culminating conference and proceedings. Funds for small research grants, postdoctoral fellowships, and data infrastructure are also included. Taken together, the funded activities represent a comprehensive and unique opportunity for improving how we understand the problems and promise of digitization.

Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the federal budget for its Weatherization Assistance Program jumped from $250 million per year to $5 billion. But how much energy will retrofitted weatherization really save among households eligible for such support? Researchers Catherine Wolfram and Meredith Fowlie want to know. They have designed large-scale randomized-control field trials to study if and when consumers take advantage of the newly available federal funds to support weatherization. The U.S. Department of Energy is interested in supporting research on its Weatherization Assistance Program, but cannot provide funding in a timely manner. Sloan funding will allow the project to move ahead now rather than waiting another year or more for the U.S. Department of Energy to provide support.

The decisions individual households make about consumer financial products can be complicated, and so many people rely on expert advice. But is such advice any good? How well can consumers tell if it is or it isn't? Antoinette Schoar, a finance professor at MIT, and her collaborators have already conducted a pilot "audit study" to address the first question by dispatching trained actors to visit selected advisors. In addition to expanding this research on the supply side of the market for retail consumer financial advice, Schoar's team also plans new laboratory experiments to investigate the demand side of that market by measuring how consumers react to videotapes of different financial advisors. This project has already secured some highly competitive funding from the National Science Foundation, but more is needed to cover the experimental costs of sample sizes large enough to be statistically convincing. Sloan support will provide the necessary funds.