Doing Economics

5
Finding Funding
Thirty years ago, when a much larger share of economists were doing
theory, finding funding was less important than it is now. With advances in
computing power, the falling cost of data, and the Credibility Revolution,
however, economics has become much more of an empirical discipline
(Backhouse and Cherrier 2017a, 2017b; Angrist and Pischke 2010), which
means one often needs funds to get data.
Although grants are almost always a necessary condition to fund primary
data collection (e.g., lab or field experiments and surveys conducted by the
researcher herself), it is not uncommon for researchers to have to buy the
data they want (e.g., data collected by market-research firms). Even a
researcher who is interested in building a data set from scratch using
publicly available sources (e.g., by combining socioeconomic data from one
source with geographic information from another) is likely to have to fund
the tedious work of merging the various kinds of data together, and so she
will need funds to pay someone else to do that.
1
Before proceeding with this chapter, I should define some of the terms I
will be using throughout. According to the Carnegie Classification of
Institutions of Higher Education,
2
the various categories of institutions of
higher learning in the US include, for the purposes of this discussion:
1. R1 universities, or doctoral universities with very high research
activity.
2. R2 universities, or doctoral universities with high research
activity.
3. D/PU universities, or doctoral/professional universities.
4. Master’s colleges and universities, which “includes institutions
that awarded at least 50 master’s degrees and fewer than 20
doctoral degrees during the update year.” These institutions are

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divided in tiers M1 (larger programs), M2 (medium programs),
and M3 (smaller programs).
5. Baccalaureate colleges, which includes “institutions where
baccalaureate or higher degrees represent at least 50 percent of all
degrees but where fewer than 50 master’s degrees or 20 doctoral
degrees were awarded during the update year.”
6. Baccalaureate/Associate’s Colleges, which includes “four-year
colleges . . . that conferred more than 50 percent of degrees at the
associate’s level.”
All of this matters because the category an institution falls into will often
determine the type of grant researchers at that institution can apply for. For
instance, many National Science Foundation (NSF) grants will not accept
applications from institutions outside of the R1 and R2 tiers. Many grants
are available only to researchers at undergraduate teaching institutions or
liberal arts colleges. As a result, researchers at R1 and R2 institutions will
tend to go for large, nationally recognized government-sponsored grants,
whereas researchers at D/PU institutions will tend to rely more on grants
from foundations since that they are unable to apply for big-ticket
governments grants such as those awarded by the NSF or the National
Institutes of Health (NIH). Likewise, researchers at undergraduate teaching
institutions and liberal arts colleges tend to target a different set of national
grants of lower monetary values, and which usually are not to be used to
purchase equipment or data unless undergraduate research is involved.
Thus, before you put in the hard work of applying for a grant, make sure
researchers at your institution can apply for that grant. If you are not
eligible for a given grant (say, because your institution is not allowed to
apply for specific grants, or because you do not have the necessary
administrative support), it is often possible for you to apply for it as a sub-
awardee or as a consultant on someone else’s grant who is at an eligible
institution.
Likewise, different fields get grants from different sources. Researchers
in agricultural economics, development economics, environmental
economics, and industrial organization are often funded through
government grants. Health economists rely on both government grants and
foundation grants, with the most prominent such foundation being the

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Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Monetary economists are almost entirely
funded through think tanks. Experimental economists tend to be funded
through foundations as well; this is especially true of behavioral
economists, whose work is often funded by the Russell Sage Foundation.
Given how each field has its funding idiosyncrasies, and given increasingly
stringent funding disclosure rules at many journals, I suggest reading the
acknowledgments footnote of the papers published in your field for
indications of where research funding comes from in that field.