Doing Economics

partners, a biosketch, a list of would-be reviewers, and many
required forms). To keep track of everything and make sure
everything is included and formatted the right way, you will
almost surely need the help of professionals. Luckily, most
research universities in the US have an office (usually called

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Office 
of 
Sponsored 
Programs, 
Sponsored 
Programs
Administration, or some variant) that helps researchers do that. So
when you do decide to apply for a large grant (e.g., an NSF or
NIH grant), the first thing you should do is to get in touch with
your institution’s sponsored programs office to give them a heads
up that you want to submit a proposal. That office will then assign
a professional to your case who will help you navigate the often
dazzlingly complex world of big grants.
5. Assemble your team. Many big grants will require a whole team
composed of a principal investigator, one or more co-principal
investigators, research professionals, graduate students, and
administrative staff.
6. Play to your strengths, and focus on the proposal itself; delegate
the rest. If you are reading this book, it is probably a safe bet to
say that you are a research economist, and therefore that your
comparative advantage when it comes to preparing grant
proposals lies in developing the proposal itself. Focus on that.
Delegate the task of filling the various forms required to submit
federal grant proposals to your institution’s sponsored programs
specialists whenever possible.
7. Get everything assembled at least two weeks before deadline. For
big external grants where you need to work with your institution’s
sponsored programs office, the institution, not the researcher,
submits the grant proposal, and so the sponsored-programs
professionals will typically need at least five business days to
guide your proposal through the relevant channels before
submitting on time to meet the deadline. That lead time is
necessary not only to ensure that all of your is are dotted and your
ts crossed so your proposal does not get rejected because of some
administrative detail, but also because other researchers at your
institution are applying for grants of a similar caliber to the one
you are applying to.
8. Wait for a decision on your proposal. Just because you have
submitted your proposal does not mean you should sit back and
not work on the research project you are seeking funding for. No
research project is ever “finished,” not even when the main

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manuscript from it is accepted for publication. There is always
something to be done. You can always think of more robustness
checks, additional ways of measuring your outcome variable, and
additional papers to be written with the data you are seeking
funding to collect. You can get the manuscript started and draft
the sections that you can write without seeing the data (e.g., most
of the introduction, the theoretical framework, the empirical
framework). Out of sight, out of mind; if you are anything like me
and your present preferences for your future self are not your
future preferences for your future self, this is a way to remain
interested in this project and not lose your motivation to work on
it if and when you do get the grant and must do the real work.
9. When you hear the result of your proposal. If you did not get the
grant, look for the next source of funding. If you received
comments on your proposal, you should use them to make it
better for the next submission. Otherwise, you can often reuse a
failed proposal for another CfP or RfP almost lock, stock, and
barrel—the rules about self-plagiarism do not apply to grant
proposals, as there is a broad understanding that such documents
are not meant for public consumption, and so it is not necessary to
reinvent the wheel. If you did get the grant, the real work begins.
Reassemble your team and make sure everyone is still committed
to their roles as stated in the proposal. Familiarize yourself again
(because it has probably been months since you checked) with the
rules about what you can and cannot spend your grant money on,
the various reporting deadlines, and what the deliverables are.
And then start spending grant money on your research project.
10. Submit reports on time. Most big, multi-year grants will require
you to submit periodic reports on your grant-related activities,
usually one such report every year. Those tend to be financial
reports that keep the funders appraised of how you are spending
their money, but some will also require a narrative about the
progress made since the last report. It may be tempting to do a
slapdash job on those reports. In the interest of maintaining a
good relationship with those who hold the purse strings, avoid
doing so. Also make sure you submit those reports on time;
submitting them late (or not at all) on some federal grants can

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lead to hefty fines, if not jail time. If you do not spend the entirety
of the grant by the end of the grant period, you can often request a
no-cost extension. Make sure you request those as early as
possible before the end of your grant if you realize you cannot do
everything before the grant period ends.
11. Once the grant period concludes, submit your final report and
other deliverables on time. Most grants will require you to submit
a final report, and possibly some deliverables (e.g., policy briefs
based on the research the grant paid for). Again, it is tempting to
do the bare minimum here and to focus instead on the research
itself, but if you want to maintain a good relationship with and get
more money from this funder, avoid doing so. One thing that is
especially easy to overlook here is that knowledge of your bad
actions with one funder are likely to easily spread to other
funders, because program officers tend to move from job to job
within their industry just like academics do, and so funder B may
withhold funds from you because of your cavalier treatment of
funder A. As with everything else in this profession, there are few
players, you will repeatedly interact with them, and you do not
know when the game ends. Act accordingly. For the final report
and deliverables, those documents are more often than not for
public consumption, so you should make an effort to write clearly
and concisely, but the level of rigor required of you is nowhere
near that of a journal article. This is where you will want to get
into descriptive statistics and provide deep background as much
as you can in order to tell a clear, accessible, and compelling
story, just as you would do for a peer-reviewed article.
12. Be grateful to the funder. Many journals require authors to
disclose any and all sources of funding for a submitted
manuscript, and many funders will also require you to
acknowledge their support in the work you publish thanks for
their financial support. Even in the absence of such requirements,
you always should include the funder (and the grant number, if
applicable) in the acknowledgement footnote of each paper made
possible by the work undertaken in the grant. This is true no
matter how big or small the grant. Make sure you send your

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funders a copy of each article, book chapter, and so on which
their funding made possible.
13. Make yourself available to review proposals for this funder. If
the source of funding for your research relies on external
reviewers to determine whether it should fund proposals, it is a
matter of simple gratitude to make yourself available to review
future proposals. Much like the peer-review process involved
with publishing journal articles, you should implicitly agree to
review two or three proposals for every proposal of yours that
gets funded.