Support for the NBER Global Financial Crisis project comes from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Established in 1934 by Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr., then President and Chief Executive Officer of General Motors, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation aims to increase innovation, accelerate breakthroughs, and improve the quality of American life through expanding our understanding of the world and how it works. To that end, the Foundation makes grants in support of high-quality research and education in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and economics.

The NBER project on the Global Financial Crisis is supported through the Foundation’s Economic Institutions, Behavior, and Performance program, which funds theory-based, empirically-driven, policy-relevant research in economics, management, regulation, law, and political economy related to the structure, behavior, and performance of the U.S. economy and its place in the global economy. A high priority is the development of objective and nonpartisan research insights that will eventually inform and strengthen critical decisions facing leaders, policymakers, and the public.

Examples of recent grants include: a project to create publicly accessible data on world financial crises throughout history; a joint initiative with the Russell Sage Foundation on applying behavioral economics to the regulation of consumer financial markets; research on the industrial organization of credit rating agencies; an annual forum addressing international monetary reform; improvements to the quality and accuracy of economic statistics related to globalization; studies linking firm characteristics to systemic risk in global markets; and the creation of a open access database containing bankruptcy records going back a century.

In addition, the Foundation supports the work of young economists through its Sloan Research Fellowship program, which awards eight $50,000 fellowships annually to promising early-career economists for use in their research. Previous Sloan Fellows in economics include Susan Athey, Esther Duflo, Sanford Grossman, David Kreps, Jonathan Levin, Steven Levitt, Kevin Murphy, Matthew Rabin, Emmanuel Saez, Andrei Shleifer, and Larry Summers.

For more information, please visit the Foundation’s website at www.sloan.org.