National Academies Behavioral Economics Committee Holds First Meeting

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s (NASEM) Committee on Future Directions for Applying Behavioral Economics to Policy held its inaugural meeting in early March. The Committee will conduct a consensus study to “develop guiding principles for applying behavioral economics research to policy, as well as a research program to support future progress, including possible avenues for collaboration across disciplines that could advance theory and method.” The meeting’s open session on March 1 featured presentations from two of the study’s sponsors, Daniel Goroff, representing the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and Christine Hunter, representing the National Institutes of Health Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR). Goroff and Hunter each presented several areas of emerging interest within behavioral economics for the committee to consider as it does its work, including the relationship between behavioral economics and social welfare, regulatory applications, behavioral macroeconomics, the economics of attention, and the conceptual underpinnings of behavioral economics, rapid testing of behavioral interventions, dissemination and scaling up, crosscutting needs across behavioral economics, and physical and mental health. More details on the study are available on the National Academies website.