Grants Database

The Foundation awards approximately 200 grants per year (excluding the Sloan Research Fellowships), totaling roughly $80 million dollars in annual commitments in support of research and education in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and economics. This database contains grants for currently operating programs going back to 2008. For grants from prior years and for now-completed programs, see the annual reports section of this website.

Grants Database

Grantee
Amount
City
Year
  • grantee: Columbia University
    amount: $357,127
    city: New York, NY
    year: 2021

    To develop an analytical framework that incorporates distributional concerns in policy evaluation

    • Program Research
    • Initiative Economic Analysis of Science and Technology (EAST)
    • Sub-program Economics
    • Investigator Matthew Backus

    “Consumer surplus” is defined as the total monetary gain to consumers when they can buy an item at a price lower than the maximum price they'd willingly pay for it. If a book costs $20 and three people would be willing to pay $40 for it, the consumer surplus of that book’s price is 3 x ($40-$20), or $60. This metric is frequently used by economists to measure the effectiveness of different policies, particularly those involving antitrust cases. Traditional calculations of social welfare that use consumer surplus, however, ignore the fact that the value of an extra dollar, known as the “marginal utility” of income, can have very different value for different people. Because adding another dollar to their paycheck means less to the affluent than it does to those who are less well off, the latter receive systematically less weight in consumer surplus calculations. This grant supports Matthew Backus at Columbia Business School, who will call attention to those weights by calculating what they actually are for different subpopulations. His goal is to develop an alternative framework to consumer-surplus analysis that makes distributional considerations more explicit. Backus’s new framework will weave distributional concerns into policy analysis, bring transparency to the ways consumer surplus measures weigh the welfare of different demographic groups, and use those weights in policy evaluation to account for distributional issues. One particularly interesting application Backus will explore is examining how public welfare measurements vary when completely different weights are assigned to various demographic groups, starting with equal weights for all.

    To develop an analytical framework that incorporates distributional concerns in policy evaluation

    More
  • grantee: National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    amount: $428,310
    city: Cambridge, MA
    year: 2021

    To expand the pool of researchers studying the economics of racial and ethnic disparities

    • Program Research
    • Sub-program Economics
    • Investigator Juan Carlos Suбrez Serrato

    This grant supports Juan Carlos Suбrez Serrato, a professor of economics at Duke University and faculty associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), who is seeking to improve our understanding of DEI issues in economics by expanding the pool of researchers studying the economics of racial and ethnic disparities. Grant funds will provide one-year fellowships to three postdoctoral researchers whose work addresses labor market disparities, the institutions that reduce or reinforce them, and the ways in which economic choices can affect such outcomes. To reach perspectives beyond those of predominant groups in the profession, the plan is for Suбrez Serrato and the rest of a highly distinguished, diverse, and experienced selection committee to recruit assiduously for postdoctoral candidates from underrepresented groups. Fellows will spend a year working at NBER’s Cambridge headquarters, where they will each both work with a mentor and also network with the Bureau’s wider scholarly community.

    To expand the pool of researchers studying the economics of racial and ethnic disparities

    More
  • grantee: University of California, Berkeley
    amount: $398,970
    city: Berkeley, CA
    year: 2021

    To study the value of administrative data access for economics research and policy

    • Program Research
    • Initiative Economic Analysis of Science and Technology (EAST)
    • Sub-program Economics
    • Investigator Abhishek Nagaraj

    “Administrative data” refers to information gathered for purposes other than research. Examples include educational, legal, hospital, commercial, and other transaction records compiled either by the public or private institutions. Such data could be extremely valuable in economics research but the process of compiling it can be complicated, expensive, and frustrating—with data quality, privacy, and documentation issues representing only some of the common problems facing researchers. As a result, we still have a limited understanding of how valuable administrative data is for economics research. This grant supports Abishek Nagaraj, head of the Data Innovation Lab at the UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, who seeks to derive fundamental economic estimates of the value of administrative data. Nagaraj will analyze the role administrative data plays in determining the quality, rate, and direction of science, with a particular focus on economics research and policy. Though his initial focus is on evaluating the value of public sector data—with a focus on the Federal Statistical Research Data Centers—Nagaraj foresees a second phase of his work that would study the value to researchers of administrative data compiled by the private sector. The project will explore topics such as: which types of research benefit from administrative data access; how data access impacts faculty and students differently; the heterogeneous impact of data access across researchers’ demographics and the status of their institutions; the impact of data access on the diversity of research topics studied and demographics in academia; how data access shapes the balance between theoretical and empirical approaches in economics; and the mechanisms through which data access translates into career outcomes.

    To study the value of administrative data access for economics research and policy

    More
  • grantee: National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    amount: $289,788
    city: Cambridge, MA
    year: 2021

    To facilitate, promote, and diversify scholarly research about the economics of artificial intelligence

    • Program Research
    • Initiative Economic Analysis of Science and Technology (EAST)
    • Sub-program Economics
    • Investigator Avi Goldfarb

    This grant supports Ajay Agrawal, Avi Goldfarb, Joshua Gans, and Catherine Tucker, who are coordinating a conference on the economics of artificial intelligence at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Five years since its successful launch in 2017, the fall 2022 instalment of the conference will focus on specific applications of AI—particularly in the realms of national security, infrastructure, and health. The conference will, therefore, seek to connect the community of economics of AI scholars with scholars from these disciplines. AI applications like those in health economics, for example, precipitate questions about privacy, ethics, venture capital, and regulatory issues. In addition to activities relating to the conference, the organizers are also planning to join efforts with the Sloan-supported Working Group on the Economics of Digitization at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

    To facilitate, promote, and diversify scholarly research about the economics of artificial intelligence

    More
  • grantee: Boston University
    amount: $405,180
    city: Boston, MA
    year: 2021

    To study the conduct and consequences of labor markets where established platforms compete with start-up firms for STEM workers

    • Program Research
    • Initiative Economic Analysis of Science and Technology (EAST)
    • Sub-program Economics
    • Investigator James Bessen

    Economists justify government intervention in a market when, left to their own devices, economic agents produce an inefficient outcome—a “market failure”. Perhaps the most well-known example is the excessive accumulation of market power by large firms, which at the extreme can create a monopoly. Market power allows large companies to tilt the playing field in their favor, impose significant barriers to market entry, and ultimately squash competition. There’s also a less well-known mechanism through which large companies can stifle competition and innovation—by scooping up all the workers. There is reason to believe that in the tech industry, small companies are being systematically outbid by large companies in the market for talent. In a theoretically efficient market, workers receive compensation commensurate with their productivity. In an inefficient market, however, large firms can afford to hire talent at outsized salaries—even to perform tasks that do not put them to their best use. This is not just a problem for the small, innovative startups that compete with large tech firms. It is also a problem for the economy and wider society, since startups play a key role in commercializing scientific and technological advances which, in turn, benefit lives and produce economic growth. This grant supports James Bessen at Boston University, who is studying the conduct and consequences of labor markets where established platforms compete with startup firms for STEM workers. Bessen’s team will explore how competition for employees from large companies affects the growth, financing, and performance of startups, and the implications for policymaking. Their research will pay particular attention to the impacts on those startups whose founders are women or persons from marginalized groups. The project’s empirical approach will combine three datasets: Burning Glass data, which covers job openings; Crunchbase, a large database of corporations which contains information on firm founding and financing amounts; and Compustat, which provides extensive financial data on publicly listed firms. In addition to their own analyses, the team will make their code publicly available, creating a valuable public good for other researchers.

    To study the conduct and consequences of labor markets where established platforms compete with start-up firms for STEM workers

    More
  • grantee: Harvard University
    amount: $50,000
    city: Cambridge, MA
    year: 2021

    To support the print publication of the Harvard Data Science Review’s special issue on implications of differential privacy for the U.S. Census

    • Program Research
    • Initiative Empirical Economic Research Enablers (EERE)
    • Sub-program Economics
    • Investigator Xiao-Li Meng

    To support the print publication of the Harvard Data Science Review’s special issue on implications of differential privacy for the U.S. Census

    More
  • grantee: Association for Computing Machinery
    amount: $20,000
    city: New York, NY
    year: 2021

    To support an inclusive conference on how computational tools, together with economic approaches, can address equity, access, and other urgent societal challenges

    • Program Research
    • Sub-program Economics
    • Investigator Rediet Abebe

    This grant supports computer scientist Rediet Abebe at the University of California, Berkeley and economist Maximilian Kasy at the University of Oxford, who are organizing the Association for Computing Machinery’s inaugural conference focused on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization—EAAMO 2021. The virtual conference will convene experts from academia, government, and industry working on the computational tools and relevant economic or social science research required to address urgent societal problems. EAAMO 2021 seeks to foster community-bridging collaborations for addressing issues such as access to education and healthcare, interventions for alleviating poverty, as well as policies to promote fairness and privacy in labor markets.

    To support an inclusive conference on how computational tools, together with economic approaches, can address equity, access, and other urgent societal challenges

    More
  • grantee: University College London
    amount: $20,000
    city: London, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
    year: 2021

    To support and expand the operations of Microeconomic Insights, an online source for summaries of top microeconomics research targeting policy audiences

    • Program Research
    • Sub-program Economics
    • Investigator Ariel Pakes

    To support and expand the operations of Microeconomic Insights, an online source for summaries of top microeconomics research targeting policy audiences

    More
  • grantee: Tufts University
    amount: $200,000
    city: Medford, MA
    year: 2021

    To support the operations and expansion of EconoFact, an online source that disseminates policy-relevant economics research

    • Program Research
    • Sub-program Economics
    • Investigator Michael Klein

    EconoFact (https://econofact.org) is a website that specializes in disseminating non-partisan and rigorous analysis from leading economists. Their work is edited in the form of short memos and podcasts that are accessible and digestible to a broad audience. Michael Klein, the leader of this effort, has assembled a network of more than 100 prominent economists who regularly contribute to EconoFact. Topics covered include employment, the costs of pollution, debts and deficits, household finance, and Medicaid reform, among others. Since its 2018 launch, the site has garnered almost 1.9 million pageviews and its work has been mentioned in major news outlets, including the PBS Newshour, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, The New York Times, The Financial Times, and NPR’s “All Things Considered”. By 2020, EconoFact had become an important source for analysis of the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, publishing more than 50 memos and 18 podcasts on the topic. Funds from this grant provide support for the continued operation and expansion of EconoFact, including the production of 150 new memos, 100 podcasts, and 36 video pieces, providing accessible, expert economic analysis on topics relevant to policymakers and the public alike.

    To support the operations and expansion of EconoFact, an online source that disseminates policy-relevant economics research

    More
  • grantee: National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    amount: $207,702
    city: Cambridge, MA
    year: 2021

    To support the growth of research on behavioral public economics through training for early-career scholars

    • Program Research
    • Initiative Behavioral and Regulatory Effects on Decision-making (BRED)
    • Sub-program Economics
    • Investigator Douglas Bernheim

    Many policies, like cigarette and alcohol taxes, are partly motivated by concerns that people can fail to act in their own best interests. Behavioral public economics (BPE) is a field that seeks to apply insights from behavioral economics to understand and evaluate such policies—with the ultimate goal of creating better policies. Despite its potential for improving policies, and lives, BPE remains a relatively niche and undersubscribed field at universities. This grant supports a team of BPE scholars working to change that. Douglas Bernheim at Stanford University, together with Hunt Allcott at Harvard University and Dmitry Taubinsky at the University of California, Berkeley, are launching a bootcamp to help grow the BPE research community. Grant funds will allow the team to run biennial two-day bootcamps at the National Bureau of Economic Research’s offices, which will include training sessions, keynote lectures, and networking opportunities for early-career scholars. To ensure educational offerings reach the widest possible audience, the effort includes focused outreach to women and underrepresented groups as well as the online posting of recorded sessions, expanding access to those unable to participate in person.

    To support the growth of research on behavioral public economics through training for early-career scholars

    More
We use cookies to analyze our traffic. Please decide if you are willing to accept cookies from our website.