The Becker Friedman Institute for Economics (BFI) is pleased to announce the award of 16 new grants supporting economics research by University of Chicago faculty and students in a wide-range of study areas. These grants will help promote ground-breaking research through the BFI Health Economics Initiative, Political Economics Initiative, and our ongoing data acquisition grant program.

Grants are intended to support faculty in the purchase of new data sets and software, research assistants, and travel. When published, the insights gleaned from this research and data will have real-world impacts across a variety of topics and fields of study.

BFI is proud to announce the recipients of the research grants, listed below, along with the research the grant will be supporting and data source where applicable.


HEALTH ECONOMICS INITIATIVE RESEARCH GRANTS

Robert Kaestner and Dmitri Koustas
Research: The Effect of Access to Health Insurance on Job Mobility, Self-employment and Gig Economy Participation

Joshua Gottlieb
Research: The Wage Distribution in Health Care

Jeff Grogger
Research: The Long-Run Health Implications of Transfer-System Reform


POLITICAL ECONOMICS INITIATIVE RESEARCH GRANTS

Rafael Jimenez (Student Award)
Research: Haters Gonna Hate: The Micro Effects of Censoring Hate Speech in Social Media

Scott Behmer (Student Award)
Research: Willingness to Provide Biased News

Mateusz Stalinski (Student Award)
Research: Mitigating Affective Polarisation and ‘Echo Chambers’: Experimental Study of Mechanisms

Luis Martinez
Research: Fiscal Rules and Local Development in Colombia

Raul Sanchez de la Sierra
Research: Who Joins Armed Organizations? Moral Sentiments, Economic Incentives, and Social Norms

Daniel Kashner (Student Award)
Research: Disrupting Polarization

Shaoda Wang (Staff Award)
Research: The Selection and the Making of Civil Servants: Evidence from China’s College Graduate Civil Services Program 


FALL 2019 BFI DATA ACQUISITION GRANTS

Anup Malani
Data Source: Center for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE)

Research: Economics of Slums

Fiona Burlig and Michael Greenstone
Ludovica Gazze (Staff Award)
Olga Rostapshova (Staff Award)
Data Source: IHS Markit data on truck registrations in all 50 states

Research: Emissions Leakage in Response to Local Pollution Regulation: Evidence from California Trucking

Joshua Gottlieb, Peter Ganong, and Pascal Noel
Data Source: Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Medicare Part D as well as National Death Index for Medicare Patients

Research: The Health Impacts of Medicine’s Changing Industrial Structure

Guillaume Pouliot and Øystein Daljord
Data Source: Webinsight

Research: Analysis of Illicit Markets

Chris Blattman and James Robinson
Laura Montenegro Helfer (Student Award)
Data Source: Collection of detailed historical government census data for Cape of Good Hope and South Africa broadly

Research: Setting the Foundation for Apartheid: The Politics of Economic Distortion in the Cape of Good Hope

David Weisbach and Ryan T. Sakoda
Data Source: Kansas Sentencing Commission (KSC)

Research: Empirical Analysis of Criminal Justice Supervision in Kansas