To encourage research on behavioral macroeconomics, the NBER, with the generous support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, is sponsoring one dissertation fellowship for a doctoral student in behavioral macroeconomics. The fellowship will be awarded for a one-year period, and will be based on the recommendations of a selection panel consisting of Andrew Caplin (New York University), Yuriy Gorodnichenko (University of California – Berkeley; chair), Ulrike Malmendier (University of California – Berkeley), Andrei Shleifer (Harvard University), and Michael Woodford (Columbia University). The panel will assess each applicant’s potential to make an important contribution to key questions in behavioral macroeconomics.
The fellowship recipient is expected to pursue academic research that is primarily related to: i) aggregate implications of limited capacity of household, firms, and policymakers to collect and process information; ii) decision making when agents have potentially mis-specified models or incomplete information sets; iii) formation of expectations; iv) optimal monetary and fiscal policy design, including communication strategy; v) interaction of economic agents with different levels of knowledge or sophistication; or vi) other topics emphasizing aggregate implications of behavioral economics. Students working in a range of fields including experimental economics, finance, international trade, public economics, and innovation economics are encouraged to apply.
The fellowship, for the academic year 2024-2025, will provide a stipend of $36,000 along with $5,000 per year to support the costs of data acquisition and travel to research meetings. The fellow may choose to reduce the stipend to fund a larger research budget. The fellowship award will be announced by the end of January, 2024. The fellow will be expected to participate in the NBER Summer Institute workshop on Behavioral Macroeconomics, held in July 2024, and, to the extent possible, to make data collected for his or her research publicly available. By May 1, 2025, the fellow must provide the selection committee with a copy of at least one research paper on behavioral macroeconomics that was completed during the fellowship period.
To be eligible for fellowship support, an applicant must be enrolled as a full-time Ph.D. student at a U.S. or Canadian college or university, and must have advanced to dissertation candidacy status by the start of the fellowship period. NBER strongly encourages, and the selection committee welcomes, applications from women, members of groups that have been under-represented in the economics profession, individuals with disabilities, and veterans.
Applicants should upload a short research proposal consisting of no more than three pages of text, two supplemental pages of tables and graphs, and one page of references, as well as a C.V.
The proposal should specify deliverables, such as research papers that will be finished at the end of the fellowship year. In addition, applicants should ask their dissertation supervisor to upload a letter of recommendation to the same website. All components of the application must be received by 11:59 pm (EST) on Thursday, December 7, 2023. Applicants are responsible for verifying that their letter of recommendation has been sent by the deadline. In fairness to all applicants, applications that are not complete, including the letter of recommendation, on December 7 will not be considered for support.