To advance understanding of household financial behavior and to provide a basis for related policy discussions, the NBER, with the generous support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, invites proposals from untenured faculty members and advanced doctoral students for small research grants. Household finance is defined broadly to include the financial functions of payments, saving and investing/portfolio-choice, borrowing/credit, and risk management, and also encompasses the structure and decisions of related businesses and the policy choices of government bodies that affect household decision-making. Preference will be given to proposals for research on household finance issues in the United States.
Funding is available for up to four research grants of $15,000 each. The grant term will be June 1, 2023 to May 31, 2024. Grants may be used to cover costs associated with travel, data acquisition, and other research expenses, but they may not be used to hire research assistants or to cover the salary of project investigators. No indirect costs are allowed, and the NBER will not make sub-awards but will reimburse expenses incurred. Research proposals, including a cover page with a title, short abstract and names of investigators, no more than three pages of project description, an itemized budget, and the principal investigator(s) curriculum vitae, should be compiled into a single PDF file and uploaded to:
http://conference.nber.org/confsubmit/backend/cfp?id=HFGs23
Proposals from doctoral students should include a one-page letter of recommendation from a senior researcher who is knowledgeable about the project. When a substantial part of the grant request will be used for data collection or production, grantees are encouraged to make the resulting data publicly available to the extent possible, for example within the limits of confidentiality agreements. This possibility should be discussed in the proposal.
Researchers from any college or university may apply. Proposals are welcome from untenured faculty members and advanced doctoral students, from researchers with and without NBER affiliations, and from researchers who are members of groups that are under-represented in economics and finance.
Proposals must be submitted by 11:59pm ET on Monday, April 3, 2023. They will be reviewed by a committee consisting of Stefania Albanesi (University of Pittsburgh and NBER), Adair Morse (US Treasury, on leave from University of California, Berkeley and NBER), Christopher Tonetti (Stanford University and NBER), and Stephen Zeldes (Columbia University and NBER). Decisions will be announced in early May, 2023.
Grantees will be expected to provide a summary of research work completed, or a preliminary working paper, by June 1, 2024, and are encouraged to submit a paper based on the research supported by their grant for potential presentation at the Summer 2024 or December 2024 NBER Household Finance meetings.
Please direct any questions to Denis Healy at dhealy@nber.org