Doing Economics

5.5 Preparing Successful Grant Proposals
Having just seen the life cycle of a typical sponsored project, it is now time
to discuss how to prepare proposals that maximize your chances of getting
funded.
Once you have chosen to submit a proposal in response to a given CfP or
RfP, the first thing you should do is ask the funder’s contact person (usually
their program officer) whether they are willing to make available examples
of previous grant proposals, both successful and unsuccessful. Many
funders will not be willing to do so, but you will not know unless you ask
politely. If the funder is unwilling to make proposals available, you can try
asking your institution’s office of sponsored programs for examples of
proposals submitted to the same funder. Even proposals on entirely different
topics can be useful for you to learn how to structure your own proposal,
what level of detail to go into, and so on.
Second, you should ask that same program officer about who is going to
be evaluating proposals for this specific RfP or CfP. Will your reviewers be
other economists in your field? Other economists who may or may not be in
your field? A mix of economists and people from other disciplines? Or
strictly people from other disciplines? Much like you would want to adapt
how you write an article depending on whether you plan on submitting to a
field journal, a general economics journal, an interdisciplinary journal, or a
general science journal, you should aim to write your proposal with a view
to your audience. An audience of economists will almost surely want to see

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equations when you discuss your theoretical framework, your empirical
framework, or both. The same equations, however, are likely to antagonize
an interdisciplinary audience.
Third, you should ask around to see whether anyone in your network has
previously received the grant you are targeting. If they have, ask them
whether they would be willing to share their insights about preparing a
successful proposal for this grant.
Fourth, you should write out a rough sketch of your proposal that
includes at the very least the following sections:
1. Introduction and motivations. Even once you have a good idea of
whom your reviewers are going to be, it is a mistake to assume
that they know everything you know. Motivate as broadly as you
can given your intended audience, state your research question as
clearly as possible (e.g., “This project aims to estimate the causal
impact of having an Asian name on the chances of getting called
for a job interview by conducting an audit study in Minneapolis–
Saint Paul during the period January 1 to June 30, 2021” is much
better than “This project aims to investigate the effect of
discrimination against Asian-Americans on the labor market”),
explain clearly how your work innovates relative to what has
already been done, and then explain how your work fits with the
funder’s objectives for this grant, which should have been stated
clearly in the RfP, as well as with the funder’s mission statement,
which you can usually find on the funder’s website. Some RfPs
reference a specific literature when they discuss the goal of the
grant. When that is the case, use that literature (as well as
references that build on that literature) to motivate your proposal.
2. Theoretical framework. This goes by many names (e.g., theory of
change), and depending on the grant you are applying for, it can
be anything from a simple verbal conceptual model (in cases
where the theory behind what you wish to study has already been
explored, or in cases where you are writing for an audience that
includes non-economists) to a hardcore theoretical model (in
cases where the theory behind what you wish to study has not
been explored or needs to be expanded and your audience

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consists of your peers). In either case, what should be crystal clear
in your theoretical framework is what you wish to test using the
funder’s grant money. Perhaps more than anywhere else in your
grant proposal, this is where it helps to know who your reviewers
are going to be, at least in terms of their disciplines, and to write
for the right audience.
3. Research. I realize this is vague, but it is necessary for me to
remain vague given the breadth of work done by economists.
Here, whatever you plan to spend the grant money on must be
discussed, whether that means collecting survey data, purchasing
one or more data sets, conducting lab or lab-in-the-field
experiments, hiring research assistants, what you will be doing in
exchange for the salary you may be paying yourself, or the course
you may be buying out of using grant funds, and if the funder
allows the following expenses: buying software or equipment
required to do the work required by the grant, traveling to
conferences to discuss the work done under this grant, paying for
publication fees for articles produced under this grant, and so on.
Whatever methods the proposed research will use, here is where
you have to discuss these in detail, clearly explaining why the
methods you propose to use will lead to the best possible result
for the funder’s money.
4. Timeline. Most CfPs will require you to submit a detailed
timeline. This is a year-by-year (and, if possible, month-by-
month) rundown of what will be done in the context of the grant
for the duration of the life of the sponsored project. A good rule
of thumb here is to be pessimistic regarding how long things will
take; if you think it will take you one month to develop an
experimental protocol, budget two months for it instead of falling
short on your own expectations and then having to play catch-up
for the remainder of the grant’s lifetime. Moreover, many funders
now want the timeline to be embedded with a management plan
discussing the people and tasks involved at every step.
5. Other requirements. Different funders will require sundry other
things as part of the proposals they entertain. This can be as minor
as a discussion of where you will place the funder’s logo on the

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materials you give your subjects as part of the treatment whose
effects you plan on studying, and as serious as a commitment to
taking part in a conference where you present your results to the
funder and other grantees.
6. References. Any grant proposal worth its salt will appeal to the
literature to explain and justify its existence. This means your
proposal should include a standard list of references. It also might
not hurt to cite the relevant work that the funder has funded in the
past.
7. Anticipated outputs. What documents or data sets will you
receiving this grant make possible? Though you may be driven by
the relentless pursuit of peer-reviewed articles (and you should be
so driven if you have yet to get tenure or equivalent in your job),
funders generally care less about peer-reviewed research. What
they do care about will vary from funder to funder, but generally
they will want you to prepare some report that can be circulated
to stakeholders (e.g., policy makers) or to the general public, to
make your data available for others to conduct their own
empirical work, to make presentations at specially convened
meetings of grantees or stakeholders, to write blog posts and op-
eds on your research findings, and so on. Increasingly, funders
will also want you to make the data collected under their aegis
publicly available, so it helps to plan for that as well.
Whether it is an explicit part of the proposal itself or not, you will almost
always have to submit a budget with your grant proposals. Indeed, it is
exceedingly rare for a funder to give you a no-strings-attached lump sum of
money to just go do research with. When preparing your budget for a grant,
you should keep the following things in mind:
1. It is fine to ask for the maximum allowed amount of money. Sure,
at the margin, between two proposals that differ only in how
much funding they request, the one that is requesting less money
is more likely to be funded. The problem with that reasoning,
however, is twofold: ceteris is rarely ever paribus, and your
proposal is unlikely to be the marginal proposal. So if a funder is

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willing to allow you to request up to $250,000, do not feel
compelled to cut your budget in order to improve your chances of
getting the grant. It may be especially tempting to cut the salary
you are paying yourself out of a grant if you think it will improve
your chances of getting funded. Avoid doing so: the funder would
much rather know that you are getting paid for the work you are
doing under their grant (and thus have an incentive to actually do
that work and give it your best effort) than see you work for free
(and thus have little to no incentive to perform the work, or treat
it as an afterthought).
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2. Provide precise dollar amounts. It is imprecise to say that your
plane ticket from Minneapolis to Lima will be roughly $1500, and
it will make you look sloppy. It is much better to say that your
MSP-ATL-LIM return trip on Delta Airlines’ main-economy
cabin departing August 15 and returning September 5 will cost
$1438.00, as that has the double advantage of (i) allowing you to
plan more carefully and precisely, and (ii) signaling that you are
taking this grant seriously. It is a small detail, but one that will
speak volumes about the kind of attention you pay to details.
3. Think of everything you will need. As a graduate student, I was
fortunate enough to get an NSF doctoral dissertation
improvement grant to conduct a survey in rural Madagascar. So in
addition to flights from the US to Madagascar, I would need to
pay for a visas, vaccines and prophylaxes, bug repellent,
respondent payouts, software for data analysis, and so on.
4. Do not skimp on anything. The same logic that applied to the
totality of your grant also applies to individual categories: it is
better to slightly overestimate how much you will need for those
categories where you cannot find exact prices ex ante just in case
things end up being more expensive than you had initially
anticipated. Cost estimates (instead of exact costs) are acceptable
in cases where you simply cannot find an exact cost, or where
there is cost uncertainty.
Figure 5.1 shows a sample budget for the Peruvian lab-in-the-field
component of the experimental work we discuss in Bellemare, Lee, and Just

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(2020). Notice the precise dates and prices for air travel. Notice
transportation costs both from the US to Peru, and also transportation costs
in country. Notice the different per diems for different cities in Peru.
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Notice how we factored in the cost of immunizations and prophylaxes given
that we were traveling to areas with non-negligible health risks. Finally,
notice how we only estimated costs for the things we could not be sure of,
such as daily salaries for in-country employees.