National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
To strengthen economics research on science funding practices and their impacts by holding conferences, producing a handbook, running boot camps, conducting site visits, and other means of community building
What can science funders like Sloan do differently to produce more scientific breakthroughs? There is consensus among scientists, for example, that funders do not take enough risks and that grant-seeking is so unduly onerous that it can distort their incentives. Are they correct? What difference does it make? Economists are not only working to find out, but also to devise and test new mechanisms that can improve grant-making. The results get better when economists, scientists, and science funders all interact before, during, and after these studies take place. To accomplish that, there are few places better than the Science of Science Funding (SoSF) meetings at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Summer Institute, which attracts participants from major private funding institutions, government funding agencies, and organizations like USPTO, the U.S. Census Bureau, Science Magazine, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Co-PIs Reinhilde Veugelers and Megan MacGarvie will lead the next phase of SoSF, with goals that include: promoting a more focused research agenda; strengthening ties between economists and the institutions they study; and engaging more graduate students and early-career faculty in the community. They will organize more than half a dozen meetings over the next three years, including annual sessions at the NBER Summer Institute, annual NBER meetings on the Scientific Workforce, and a stand-alone “stock-taking” conference for science funders. Proceedings from this major conference will be published as a curated volume designed to make widely accessible the key results and open questions from the economics of science funding literature to date. The PIs will also lead site visits to scientific research facilities, organize workshops and dissertation feedback sessions for PhD students, and establish a small travel grants program to enable early-career researchers to visit the scientific organizations or science funders they intend to study