This grant provides renewed funding for the participation of junior faculty in the NBER Summer Institute. For more than twenty five years, NBER's Summer Institute has offered an ideal environment for developing new ideas and forging collaborative work relationships. Summer Institute brings together economists and scholars in other fields from universities, government, and international organizations for a few days or a few weeks of seminars, workshops, conferences, and cooperative research.
The Summer Institute is five to six weeks long, and includes at least 40 sessions organized and co-organized by over 70 individuals. There are more than 1,200 attendees from over 400 universities and non-academic institutions, and in 2005 more than 60% of the individuals who attended Summer Institute were not NBER affiliates. While there are many presentations of work nearing completion, emphasis is placed on the workshop aspects of the program where new ideas are raised, preliminary research ideas are developed, and plans for joint or coordinated research efforts are established. Efforts are made to include a wide variety of new participants, and to reach out to women and minorities. Calls for papers are circulated widely and are available on the NBER website.
Broader Impacts: The NBER Summer Institutes generate timely and influential research on important economic policy questions related to such topics as international financial stability, economic productivity and technology, enviornmental regulations, social security policy, and educational policies. The workshops are an invaluable part of the research infrastructure in ecobnomics and assist the research of a large number of economists.
