This grant funds a team of researchers led by John Campbell of Harvard University and Kaye Husbands Fealing of Georgia Tech to integrate comprehensive new research on the financial challenges facing higher education institutions in the United States. The team will commission 10 papers from a diverse selection of independent researchers on such topics and trends as: the stagnating number of college-age domestic students; growing student debt burdens; the imperative to deliver more diverse, equitable, and inclusive outcomes; the rise of remote learning; the implications of public-private partnerships in funding research; and low expected safe returns in capital markets. Findings will be presented, debated, and refined at a conference and the results disseminated in both the popular media and in scholarly publications including an edited volume. The entire effort will be informed by input from a diverse advisory board, representing all kinds of educational institutions from community colleges and Minority-Serving Institutions to private colleges and state universities. This will help ensure that the resulting scholarship is not only of compelling interest to academics, but also of direct use to college and university leaders, to officials and policy makers, and to everyone concerned with the future of higher education.  

In 2021, economist Nick Huntington-Kline conducted an experiment. He started with two papers recently published in high quality economics journals. The first reported on the effects of compulsory schooling on teenage pregnancy rates, looking at policy interventions in the United States and Norway. The second was a study of the effects of employer-provided health insurance on entrepreneurship. Huntington-Kline provided the data and methodology underlying each study to independent researchers, asking them to replicate the original authors’ findings, if they could. In total, seven attempted replications were made of both studies. What Huntington-Klein found, in work that would later win the Western Economic Association’s Paper of the Year award, was significant variation in the attempted replications. Given the same data and the same methodological instructions, the seven replication attempts reached different point estimates of the magnitude of the effect they were replicating, different estimates of the statistical significance of those estimates, and different confidence intervals for their conclusions. This result, though only a report of seven replications, has potentially significant implications for empirical science, including what sort of findings should count as publishable, how worried we should be when a result fails to replicate, and the adequacy of how research methodologies are documented and shared. Funds from this grant support an extension of Huntington-Kline’s work, allowing him and his team to field a similar experiment at significantly larger scale, using 100 replications instead of seven. The study will allow Huntington-Kline to document with greater robustness and precision how researcher choices in the analysis of data lead to variability in the conclusions they reach.

Economics is deeply practical, and even basic economic concepts can help with analyzing everything from personal finance, to national politics, to institutional dynamics, to everyday decision-making under uncertainty. Introductory economics courses, however, often elide this practicality by focusing on technical material rather than examples from, and applications to, real life. This choice has implications for who goes on to study economics. Black, Indigenous, Latina/o/x, and women undergraduates or others who could study more economics may not always see its relevance to compelling issues like climate change, public health, inequality, or the future of work. Funds from this grant will help develop a new approach to teaching introductory economics built around support for a text to be called Understanding the Economy. This book will not only cover basic concepts, but also their relevance to important social issues often skipped over in first-year courses. Such topics range from historical examples like the economics of American slavery to current controversies over the use of affirmative action in education and employment. Beyond producing the book, funds will also support outreach and dissemination efforts. Faculty will, for example, receive training on how to handle topics sensitively in the classroom.  Less well-resourced institutions will also receive help with taking full advantage of all the new, inclusive, and exciting curricular materials that Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences is developing in cooperation with a wide range of other institutions.

Funds from this grant provide ongoing support for the production and dissemination of an unusual journal called Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (BPEA). Brookings’ reputation for objectivity, its longstanding commitment to nonpartisan analysis, and the policy relevance of the topics it addresses have made the BPEA one of the most influential vectors for the communication of academic scholarship to regulators, policymakers, journalists, and the public. Brookings editors commission papers from outstanding experts, prominent or fledgling, on specific topics of relevance to policymakers. Each draft is carefully edited to ensure both its accuracy and its accessibility to a nonspecialist audience. Expert respondents critique the draft when it is first presented at a BPEA conference.  Vigorous debate ensues among the audience members in attendance, which routinely include top academics, officials, and reporters. Papers are then revised and edited again before appearing in a BPEA volume. Published along with each are respondents’ remarks as well as a summary of the live discussion. Grant funds will support two BPEA conferences per year, leading to the production of six volumes featuring a total of between 30 and 36 high-quality, policy-relevant papers.