Submissions Open: Inflation Reduction Act (US)

Focus Areas

• Labor market and regional effects
  • What are the effects of IRA investments on the quantity and characteristics of jobs created or displaced? What are the effects on local and regional labor markets, and are there notable differences across places? Are there regional characteristics associated with different outcomes?
  • What role are the Inflation Reduction Act’s labor and community protections playing in efficient and effective project delivery and outcomes for workers, communities, and firms?
  • How are states and municipalities leveraging IRA investments, braiding or stacking them with other major federal investments, or utilizing them to access other U.S. financial tools and practices? What are the spillover effects in states or regions from major investment funding, beyond job creation from individual projects?
• Innovation and investment
  • Innovation plays a critical role in both promoting economic growth and in accelerating decarbonization. What are the impacts of the Inflation Reduction Act on innovation, and what are the distributional implications of clean energy innovation?
  • What have been the effects of IRA investments on investment in domestic clean energy industries? Where has that investment happened? How has it connected to local economic development across places?
  • How much are IRA investments spurring supply-side activity or demand-side behavior in communities affected by previous manufacturing declines or energy shocks?
• Design and modeling of economic and climate policy
  • What specific policy tools help maximize efficiencies and improve outcomes at the intersection of decarbonization and equitable economic growth? They are interested in research that analyzes the effectiveness of individual policy tools—such as tax credits, competitive grant programs, or loans—as well as research that compares the performance of different policies and/or assesses how these policies work in tandem.
  • Where are there opportunities to integrate climate and economic research frameworks to better evaluate the Inflation Reduction Act in the short run and inform policy design in the future? How can the inputs and outputs of economic and climate models be better harmonized?

Funding Information

• Grants awarded in response to this request are expected to fall in the $25,000 to $80,000 range.
• Summer salary is capped at $20,000 per year per Principal Investigator, not including fringe.
• Grant timelines should be limited to 2 years.

Costs Covered

• Equitable Growth is willing to fund a wide range of activities, including researcher salary and benefits, research assistance, data purchase, and costs associated with conducting experiments or research-related travel. Their grants cannot cover indirect overhead.
• Tuition and related fees are an allowable cost if student research assistants are included in the budget request.

Eligibility Criteria

• This Request for Proposals is open to researchers affiliated with a U.S. college or university and graduate students currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program at a U.S. college or university in the dissertation stage of their career. The affiliated university must administer the grant.
• Researchers not affiliated with a college or university, or with non-U.S. colleges and universities, can be part of a research team and can receive support via a grant. However, the Principal Investigator must be affiliated with a U.S. college or university, which must administer the grant.
• Researchers who are the Principal Investigator for an open Equitable Growth grant with an end date beyond July 1, 2025 are not eligible to apply. Co-Principal Investigators/Collaborators with open grants are eligible to apply.

Evaluation Criteria

• Responsiveness to the questions posed in this RFP
• Anticipated ability of the proposed research to provide policymakers with actionable insights to inform effective policy design and implementation
• Methodological soundness of the research design, including appropriate data
• Research questions that are appropriately framed within the existing literature
• Potential for proposed research to advance the literature

For more information, visit Washington Center for Equitable Growth.