The following are two funding opportunities that have just been announced, a "heads up" about two forthcoming major initiatives and a request for your ideas on infrastructure projects that would benefit economics for a "wish list" we are assembling for future budget requests.

ALERT 1: URBAN RESEARCH INITIATIVE
NSF expects to make 10 to 20 awards totaling $6 million on the dynamics of change in urban environments.
DEADLINE: July 22, 1998
MORE INFORMATION: www.nsf.gov under crosscutting programs - Urban Research Initiative (URI)

ALERT 2: CAREER Awards
NSF will spend at least $2.5 million next year in the social and behavioral sciences on awards for a minimum of $200,000 over 4 years to young untenured faculty
DEADLINE: July 22, 1998
MORE INFORMATION: NSF's website www.nsf.gov under crosscutting programs - CAREER

HEADS-UP: EDUCATING FOR THE FUTURE
NSF has requested for next year $9 million for social and behavioral research on LEARNING AND CHILDREN and much more for EDUCATING FOR THE FUTURE. If you have an NSF grant and would like to organize or participate in workshops that will help define the solicitations for EDUCATING FOR THE FUTURE, look for an announcement at www.nsf.gov or send me an e-mail (dnewlon@nsf.gov). Check www.nsf.gov for announcements in these areas next fall.

REQUEST FOR IDEAS:
We are trying to assemble a "wish list" of infrastructure ideas that would benefit economists. Some of these ideas might eventually become the basis of new partnerships between NSF and other government agencies, e.g., the Census/NSF data access centers. Others might generate proposals that could compete for funds from one of NSF's new budgetary initiatives or become the basis of an initiative proposal. Please send me your ideas by e-mail (dnewlon@nsf.gov) on or before June 1st (although I'll be glad to get your ideas at any time). At this point all I need is a paragraph on each idea. Appended below is an outline of ideas discussed at the April Economics Advisory Panel meeting and some other suggestions to illustrate what we're looking for.

INFRASTRUCTURE ASSESSMENT IN ECONOMICS
Infrastructure projects strengthen research resources by providing better instrumentation; creating new software; generating new or improved data; providing centers, workshops, conferences and institutes that facilitate interaction among researchers; improving the training and background of researchers and their students assistants; providing technical and archival assistance; and producing new analytical and measurement methods.

There are a growing number of special infrastructure funding opportunities. We will use this information to encourage infrastructure proposals that would benefit economists.

Examples of potential infrastructure proposals by subfield of economics follow. Please elaborate on the examples that interest you or add other ideas that we've missed. I've also copies some suggestions

Basic Theory -
• Institutes that bridge mathematics, economic theory and applications;
• Interdisciplinary research teams that try to forge new subfields or reinvigorate existing fields, e.g.,cognitive psychology and utility theory, engineering and mathematical industrial organization, behavioral economics;
• Software development that facilitates economic modelling and applications, e.g., GAMBIT;
• Experimental laboratory with budgets for subject payments for testing economic theories.

Econometrics -
• Institutes, workshops and conferences that bridge statistics/computer science/ economics, e.g. Berkeley Econometrics Laboratory;
• Software and Hardware to push out computational frontiers of economics, i.e., supercomputers, workstations;
• Software archives to store and make accessible new software in economics;
• Institute to speed economic application of advances in econometrics, i.e., non-parametric and semi-parametrics; and
• Special award to encourage the development and application of computer graphics and other visualization methods for economic applications.

Macroeconomics -
• Institute or team research to achieve a major advance in business and governmental economic forecasting, general equilibrium modelling, calibration, etc.;
• Total National Income Accounts that more accurately represent economic aggregates, e.g. work by Robert Eisner;
• Workshops, Institutes that improve links to policy, i.e., Brookings, Carnegie/Rochester, NBER macro;
• Fill gaps in or improve quality of macroeconomic data on consumption, economic growth, aggregate technological change, financial transmission mechanisms, unemployment, international spillovers, etc.

International -
• Institute or teams that strengthen the scientific quality of economic development;
• Access to detailed data on import/export flows and costs for US and other countries, e.g. Robert Feenstra's data;
• Better measures of purchasing power parity and other adjustments in international data to permit more accurate international comparisons, e.g., Summers/Heston's Penn Tables;
• Collection of better data on transition economies, e.g., Shleifer's research on privatization in Russia;
• Financial data tracking representative sample of significant transactions in international financial markets organized in ways that facilitate the study of financial panics, monetary unions, etc.;
• International data archives such as the Luxembourg Income Study that permit rigorous international economic comparisons;
• Postdoctoral and collaborative research for U.S. economists at foreign institutions;
• Global perspective in macro, finance, industrial organization, labor, public finance etc.;
• Comparable international data on human capital investments; and
• Better data on immigration both on socioeconomic environment before and after immigration

Finance -
• Daily transaction data necessary to study market microstructure;
• Better time series estimation methods for analyzing exceptionally large volume of financial data;
• Laboratories with sufficient resources to test financial theories and simulate the effects of different financial institutions on market performance;
• Brokerage data on behavior of individual investors; and
• Access to longitudinal data on banks and other financial institutions.

Industrial Organization -
• Organizational database on different types of jobs, job hierarchies, wages, benefits, etc. motivated by new theories of the firm with their emphasis on internal business organization
• Data collection, experiments and theoretical research on auction design
• Science and Technology data - R&D, patents, scientist employees, other measures of discoveries, bibliometric measures, international S&T indicators
• Private sector initiative for economists (partial funding from business for NSF competitive research)
• Access to longitudinal data files especially on the creation and loss of jobs by businesses of all size
• Linkage of longitudinal business establishment data files to demographic, environmental, geographic, and other data

Resource -
• Institutes like the MIT Energy Lab that draw together the physical, biological and social sciences for environmental work;
• Improved integrated models for forecasting and studying resource depletion, energy costs and other environmental and resource issues;
• Experiments with contingent valuation and other methods of pricing environmental assets;
• "Green" national income accounts; and
• Collaborative research across political economy, industrial organization and resource economics.

Labor -
• Consistent longitudinal time use data for a nationally representative sample of US families;
• New Panel Study of Income Dynamics or "refresher" added to the PSID to better track mid- to long-term socioeconomic trends for US families;
• Nationally representative longitudinal data on racial, ethnic, immigrant and other groups;
• Links of longitudinal family data of parents and children to housing, schooling, health, employers, and other data;
• Institute or teams on interdisciplinary research on child development, education and economics;
• Organizational databases on Universities, schools, and other educational institutions; and
• Better data on income distribution.

Political Economy -
• Better tax and expenditure data (IRS data linked through SSN to IRS data);
• Organizational database for political organizations and other nonprofits, e.g. Jim Heckman's study of the JPTA;
• Interdisciplinary studies of interest group behavior motivated by theoretical research on rent seeking;
• Economic module for the National Election Studies motivated by public choice and other economic theories; and
• Better indices of international political instability.

Economic History -
• Extend time series used in other areas of economics with historical data;
• Integrate anthropological, biological and other data into historial time series, e.g., Robert Fogel's work with height;
• Better documentation of historical data; and
• Program for facilitating linkages among historical data.

Infrastructure Suggestions
The following are some examples of infrastructure suggestions that we've already received that illustrate what we hope to get from our request.

I want to echo/reinforce my comments on two data issues relevant to public finance. First, we are in desperate need of a genuine tax-based data set with which to do sensible research. At the moment, there are only two unsatisfactory alternatives: use a survey data set (e.g., PSID, CPS, ...) and make up tax rates (perhaps in a sophisticated fashion using TAXSIM, perhaps not). Or, get the panel of tax returns that Joel Slemrod peddles. The latter is pricey and does NOT have decent data on other aspects of the individuals. In short, it is time for a panel data set of tax returns matched to other data about individuals/households/business activities for research purposes. I can think of a number of issues (savings, Feldstein's revenue- raising critiques, efficacy of EITC, fairness of capital gains, .....) that would benefit immediately. At the deep level of just looking at taxes and economic behavior, we would be much better off.

I think it would be incredibly useful to commission occasional surveys about prices in different industries. For example, although drug, telecom, electricity, tobacco, etc prices are in the new constantly, economists have very little data that tell us about actual transaction prices. These data could inform discussions of the CPI, market competition and public policy discussions. The IO and policy communities have long noted the importance of new firms and entrepreneurs to economic growth, but we have little data that describes the birth of firms. Such data might include survival, employee, executive, patent, funding, R&D, sales and employment data.

To focus the enterprise, one might start with high technology companies. I know several people who would be interested in assembling better capital stock data. There is great interest out here in trying to measure investments in computers and computer productivity. Currently we have very poor data on computer purchases and use. A continuous survey might be very useful.

Many ideas discussed at the ASA-Sloan Foundation workshop addressed system-wide issues, such as confidentiality and on-site accessibility of economic statistics. Other ideas, some of which are already noted included:

• Improvement of microdata bases.
• Cost of living indexes.
• Improvement of data on prices, in particular when new products are introduced.
• Measurement of prices, output, and quality in services
• Classification of services.
• Measurement of prices of both goods and services by the flow of services provided.
• Measurement of technological change.
• Measurement of the degree of business globalization and its effects.
• Measurement of assets and other wealth.
• Measurement of the contribution of births and deaths of firms to the economy.
• Measurement of outsourcing as it effects the measurement of investment and purchases of services.
• Improvement of the national accounts: measurement of intangibles and of non-market goods and services.
• Measurement and analysis of time use.
• Measurement of poverty.
• Measurement of productivity.
• Assessment of current expenditures vs. capital investment in government spending.

Develop world tariff data series:
Development of a consistent set of world tariff data for internationally traded goods would improve the quality and comparability of economic analysis of trade restrictions and liberalization. This project would collaboratively explore data needs, availability, and constraints for use in analysis of the increasing number and type of trade liberalization initiatives. These initiatives include World Trade Organization (WTO), Free Trade Area for the America, and the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. Numerous organizations, such as the World Bank, FAO, Inter-American Development Bank, OECD, WTO, UNCTAD, and the Global Trade Analysis Project consortium rely on data for tariffs applied by major countries on import commodities in order to assess the economic effects of trade liberalization initiatives. Such a project would also allow collaboration among agencies and academic institutions on how to consistently handle conceptual issues in international tariff analysis.

These issues might include international comparability of detailed tariff and trade data, development of consistent tariff equivalents for specific and mixed tariffs, and analysis of tariffication in the context of the WTO. As a first step in developing international collaboration to improve tariff data, ERS would propose holding a workshop among interested international organizations, academics, and government agencies to deal with the data needs, data availability, and data constraints for conducting the type of trade analysis summarized above.

The Measurement of Nontariff Barriers:

There is increasing need for better measures of the many nontariff barriers that currently impede the international delivery of goods and services. This is the case especially since new trade negotiations to be held in the next few years under the auspices of the World Trade Organization (WTO) will cover a variety of internationally traded services as well as traded agricultural products and manufactured goods.

Because of the periodic multilateral trade negotiations held since the late 1940s, tariffs on industrial products in the major industrialized countries have been reduced to relatively low levels. But nontariff barriers of many kinds still exist for a variety of traded manufactured products.

Services trade is also impeded by many nontariff barriers, especially in the form of domestic regulatory measures. Accurate and comprehensive measures of these nontariff barriers are needed in order to assess the impacts that these barriers have on economic welfare in the United States and other major trading countries and to provide the basis for WTO negotiations designed to reduce or remove these barriers.

There exist comparatively few systematic measures of these barriers, apart from some simple counts of the various types of barriers and selected measures based on comparisons of domestic and international prices, auction prices of quota rights, and government procurement discrimination.

By the same token, there has been considerable work done on methodological approaches that might be taken in measuring these barriers, including Robert E. Baldwin, "Measuring the Effects of Nontariff Trade-Distorting Policies," in J. de Melo and A. Sapir (eds.), "Trade Theory and Economic Reform," Basil Blackwell, 1991, and Alan V. Dearforff and Robert M. Stern, "Measurement of Nontariff Barriers," University of Michigan Press, 1998 (forthcoming).

The gap to date between actual measurement and proposed methodologies is due mainly to the need for access to a variety of expertise and information in order to implement the various methodologies. Using the different approaches, Baldwin and Stern propose a cooperative effort between academic economists, government officials, and private sector representatives to undertake a pilot study of a few industries in the United States and other major trading countries to determine the feasibility of measuring the price-increasing effects of different barriers and regulations that impede international trade in these industries.

Education in Measurement Issues:
Development of teaching modules on conceptual and methodological measurement issues that can be integrated into graduate course work and cooperative efforts with AEA, CRIW and other entities to introduce these modules into courses.

Development of mini-courses on measurement that can be offered in conjunction with professional conventions such as the ASSA, ASA, and NABE conventions;

Development and dissemination of user-friendly materials on measurement targeted toward different audiences: Professional economists, businessmen, journalists, undergraduate and graduate students.

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