February 15, 2022
Assistant Professor Peter Ganong

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation today announced that it has selected Peter Ganong, assistant professor of public policy at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, to receive a 2022 Sloan Research Fellowship.

Awarded annually since 1955, the Sloan Research Fellowship Program recognizes and rewards outstanding early-career faculty who have the potential to revolutionize their fields of study. More than 1,000 researchers are nominated each year for 128 prestigious fellowship slots in eight scientific and technical fields: chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, Earth system science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, and physics. Winners receive a two-year, $75,000 fellowship which can be spent to advance the fellow’s research.

Ganong’s research in economics studies the effect of public policies on people facing difficult financial circumstances. In his research on the foreclosure crisis, he found that most borrowers defaulted due to insufficient liquidity and that many foreclosures could have been averted through liquidity-focused modifications to mortgages. He has found that unemployment benefits play a crucial role in sustaining the consumption of unemployed workers. His most recent work studies the effects of unemployment benefit supplements and Economic Impact Payments during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“The pandemic demonstrated the potential of government policy to protect households from poverty in the face of unprecedented economic disruption. However, the design of the payments was constrained by historic disinvestment in the tax-and-transfer system,” said Ganong. “The inability to target payments to people who needed them the most---combined with the policy decision to offer a series of universal payments---may be one factor that contributed to the high inflation that we are experiencing today.”

Ganong plans to use the grant to study the effects of racial wealth inequality and the effects of high liquidity on the US economy.

In order to qualify for a fellowship, candidates must first be nominated by a department head or senior researcher. Bruce Meyer, the McCormick Foundation Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, nominated Ganong.

“Peter has done breakthrough research that not only informs government policy but makes us rethink how households make fundamental choices such as how much to spend and whether to pay their mortgage,” Meyer said.

Ganong is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He received his BA and PhD in economics from Harvard. He has spent two years in public service: one at the White House Council of Economic Advisers and one at the City of Boston’s Citywide Analytics Team. He has taught at the University of Chicago since 2017 and was a Visiting Assistant Professor at MIT during fall of 2021.