This award provides support to Dr. Susan Feigenbaum under the National Science Foundation's Faculty Awards for Women Scientists and Engineers Program. The objectives of this program are to recognize the nation's most outstanding and promising women scientists and engineers in academic careers in research and teaching, to retain them in academia, and to facilitate the further development of their careers. This award will allow the investigator to pursue her research agenda concerning the impact of institutional design on individual and organizational behavior. In particular, she will study institutional constraints facing economic researchers and examine the resulting (dis)incentives to engage in careful quantitative analysis. She will provide an in-depth theoretical and empirical study of the "market" for (ir)reproducible statistical analysis. It will evaluate the sufficiency of existing mechanisms to monitor empirical work and propose alternative institutional responses. Her topics to be studied include: (i) the impact of computing price declines on the volume and complexity of data analysis, data availability, and replicability; (ii) the relationship between expositional quality and degree of replication, and their relative importance in terms of journal acceptance; (iii) the effect of co- authors and researcher specialization on the production of careful research; (iv) differential incentives created by government versus private funding mechanisms to promote research quality; (v) the role of the editorial process and peer review in assuring reproducible results; and (vi) the relative success of scientific institutions in self-policing "important" disciplinary and policy research discoveries.
