The Penn World Table (PWT), a set of national accounts data which measures real GDP and relative price levels across countries and over time, is one of the most frequently cited datasets in economics. A 2009 found that, of all the cross-country empirical publications in the economic growth and development literature, nearly two thirds are based on the PWT. Version 6.1 of the PWT has more than 3,000 citations. Until now, the PWT has been a product of the Center for International Comparisons at the University of Pennsylvania, and was produced through the pioneering work of Simon Kuznets, Irving Kravis, Alan Heston, Robert Summers, and Bettina Aten. Yet this team has now either retired or moved on to other pursuits. At this point, Heston, at 77 years old, is the only one still active in preparing the PWT, and shortages of staff and funding have slowed revisions and methodological improvements to the tables. The PWT needs a new home. This grant will partially fund the transition of the Penn World Table from the University of Pennsylvania to the University of California, Davis and the University of Groningen under the care of Robert Feenstra and Marcel Timmer, respectively. Additional funds are provided to evaluate and, if appropriate, implement proposed methodological improvements to the PWT.

Researchers who study household finance study how households make investment decisions, with a particular eye on the common, costly mistakes households make when making important investment choices, such as purchasing a home or allocating savings for retirement. As such, conclusions reached by researchers in this field are highly relevant to policy and regulatory issues of consumer protection, financial literacy, and financial product design. Unfortunately, however, household finance research has tended to focus on households in a small number of developed countries such as the U.S., Sweden, and Finland, that have good, easily accessible data on household investment behavior. Though understandable-good research requires good data-the small number of such countries limits the usefulness of the research conducted, since it is unclear how lessons learned from the household financial behavior of Swedes might be applied to Brazil or India where market conditions, social norms, and national institutions differ substantially. This grant supports the work of Tarun Ramadorai of Oxford University and John Y. Campbell of Harvard University who are working to broaden and enrich the field of household finance by bringing new international comparative perspectives to the field. Over the next three years, Ramadorai and Campbell will create a new international dataset on household financial behavior sourced from both developed and developing economies. Grant funds will support the creation of this dataset, its analysis, a fellowship to encourage participation by foreign economists in the project, and several conferences and academic workshops focused on topics relevant to the field.

What motivates people to share what they know for the common good? Why do people edit pages in Wikipedia, contribute to the Zagat Guide, or participate in open-source software development when there is little or no (apparent) incentive to do so? Not only do traditional economic theories and models have little to say about the "economics of knowledge contribution," the issues are not even easy to talk about within existing theoretical frameworks. This grant will fund the work of economists Joshua Gans of the University of Toronto and Fiona Murray of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as they seek to understand and explain the economics of why some uncompensated creative activities thrive for the benefit of society while others do not.

This grant funds an initiative at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) at Middlebury College's Monterey Institute of International Studies to expand course offerings at CNS's unique master's program in Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies, broadening and strengthening the scientific aspects of the curriculum. Using Sloan Foundation funding, CNS will add five additional science- and technology-based courses with at least 15 students each; offer two new weekend workshops annually on science- and technology-based themes with at least 25 students each; and continue its pre-enrollment, two-week, non-credit course in basic science and mathematics for new M.A. students.

In fall 2010, the Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) of Middlebury College's Monterey Institute of International Studies was selected by the Austrian Foreign Ministry to manage a new Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation in Vienna, home-city of the International Atomic Energy Agency and, therefore, the global center for nuclear diplomacy. In September 2011, CNS ran a pilot one-week intensive course on nonproliferation at the new Center, aimed at providing nonproliferation education and training for diplomats, government officials, and mid-career professionals at international organizations. Funds from this grant will allow CNS to expand its offerings in Vienna either to one two-week course annually or, if diplomats cannot spare that much time for training, to two one-week courses. Each course would have at least 20 participants, at least 70% of whom would be from Non-Aligned countries. The rest would be diplomats from other countries or employees of international organizations, most of whom have excellent technical backgrounds but limited knowledge of the politics, institutions, and agreements that govern the international nuclear regime.