This grant funds three projects by the University of Chicago’s Macro-Financial Modeling (MFM) initiative. Led by University of Chicago economist and Nobel laureate Lars Peter Hansen and Andrew Lo of MIT, the MFM initiative is a group of distinguished economists, business professors, and other finance experts who have come together to meet the challenges of modeling the complex interactions between the real economy and modern financial institutions. The first supported project is a summer school for graduate students, which will bring young scholars from a variety of intellectual backgrounds to the University of Chicago to introduce them to macro-finanical modeling and to work on specific projects related to it. The second is an open call competition for new or crowd-sourced solutions to problems posed by the MFM initiative. The call will elicit the best thinking from outside the group, encourage innovative and creative approaches to established problems, and expand the reach of the initiative to those not yet involved in the program.  The third project is the development and construction of an online platform for comparing and archiving various macro-financial models. This platform will allow MFM scholars to compare, contrast, and evaluate different models and will spur integrative work that may lead to the combination or improvement of existing models.