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.