The Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago has been awarded grants totalling $1.5 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the CME Group Foundation, to expand its efforts to generate better quantitative models for assessing the economy’s vulnerabilities to disruptions from financial markets.
The grants support the institute’s Macro Financial Modeling (MFM) Initiative. Formed in 2012, this project brings together a group of top scholars to develop and evaluate macroeconomic models that better account for financial sector influences on the aggregate economy.
The Sloan Foundation, which founded the MFM initiative with an initial grant of $995,000 in 2011, has pledged an additional $1 million over the next three years. The CME Group Foundation granted the institute $500,000 over two years to continue the project’s core operations.
The new grant from the Sloan Foundation will support unique activities, including a special summer session focused on expanding the MFM Initiative to engage the rising generation of young scholars. The intensive programme will provide hands-on training and discussion of the latest advances, model construction methodologies, tools for assessment, and empirical evidence related to crafting and evaluating sophisticated macro financial models.