Re: Tracking NSF grants by family members not in economics

From: Alison Oaxaca <aoaxaca_at_nber.org>
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2012 09:41:58 -0400

Just about all of our grants are in SBE. The one thing I should
point out is that there used to be a directorate called SES that held
most of the Econ/SciSIP grants. SES are older grants, but a number
of our SES grants are still active.

Thanks,
Alison

At 11:13 AM 6/22/2012, Alex Aminoff, NBER wrote:
>On 6/22/2012 10:17 AM, Wayne Gray wrote:
>>It seems reasonable to me to restrict the search to the SBE
>>directorate - the danger of adding lots of false positives from
>>including other directorates seems to outweigh the negatives of
>>missing one or two non-Bureau grants in our listing.
>
>Well, I found a counterexample.
>
>Andrew W. Lo, RA, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
>
>has an NSF grant through the ENG (Engineering Directorate) called "A
>new paradigm for understanding and controlling systemic risks in
>financial markets".
>
>It is administered through MIT.
>
> - Alex
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>>Wayne
>>________________________________________
>>From: Alex Aminoff, NBER [aminoff_at_nber.org]
>>Sent: Friday, June 22, 2012 9:47 AM
>>To: grantadmins_at_nber.org
>>Subject: Tracking NSF grants by family members not in economics
>>
>>Can I make the simplifying assumption that family members will only have
>>NSF grants that we care about through a small number of NSF
>>"organizations" or "directorates"?
>>
>>mysql> select nsfdirectorate,count(*) from grants_nsf where organization
>>like 'National Bureau%' group by nsfdirectorate;
>>+----------------+----------+
>>| nsfdirectorate | count(*) |
>>+----------------+----------+
>>| MPS | 1 |
>>| SBE | 167 |
>>+----------------+----------+
>>2 rows in set (0.00 sec)
>>
>>
>>The advantage of filtering like this is we eliminate at one stroke the
>>large number of false positives - people with similar names as our
>>family members working at a different institution in an entirely
>>different field.
>>
>>However, the danger is that we miss non-NBER-administered grants that
>>they actually have. The question is, do we care?
>>
>>Back in 1996 or so it so happens that I spent a year working as
>>part-time IT support for the Brain & Behavior Initiative, a joint thing
>>cutting across departments at Harvard. Michael Jensen, our family
>>member, was one of the lead faculty. So it is entirely possible that
>>Michael Jensen has, or had, an NSF grant having to do with Brain &
>>Behavior, not economics, through a different NSF directorate. The
>>question is, is that a grant that we care a lot about seeing in the
>>program review as a non-NBER-administered grant?
>>
>>

Alison Oaxaca
Grants Administrator
National Bureau of Economic Research
1050 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02138
Phone: (617) 588-0339
Fax: (617) 868-7194
Received on Mon Jun 25 2012 - 09:41:58 EDT