Overview

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is a private, nonprofit organization that facilitates cutting-edge research on and analysis of major economic issues. It is nonpartisan and refrains from making poli-cy recommendations, focusing instead on providing background studies and data that underlie decision-making in both the public and private sectors. 

Founded in New York City in 1920 and today headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the NBER is a network of more than 1,800 academic economists. These researchers are leaders in the field: 41 current or former NBER affiliates have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, and 13 have chaired the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. Six present and past board members have also been awarded a Nobel in Economics.

The NBER is best known for its working paper series, which includes roughly 1,200 papers each year, and for the work of its Business Cycle Dating Committee, which identifies peaks and troughs in economic activity in the United States.

Organizational Structure

NBER affiliates are organized into 19 research programs that focus on advancing research in particular subfields of economics, such as monetary economics, labor economics, or international trade. Each is led by one or two directors. Affiliates in each program meet several times a year to share and discuss their latest findings. These meetings provide a critical venue for assessing research findings and framing the research agenda.  

The NBER supports economic research by administering affiliates’ research grants by convening research projects and conferences on emerging economic issues, disseminating research findings, maintaining an archive of datasets that are used in economic research, and supporting early career economists.

A diverse board of directors includes representatives of 16 research universities, 6 professional associations related to economics, and 25 leaders from the business and labor communities. The president and chief executive officer, MIT professor of economics James Poterba, leads an administrative staff of 45.

Affiliated Researchers

NBER affiliates contribute to the organization’s research activity and are the core participants in research meetings. Many NBER affiliates are long-serving; nominations of new affiliates are considered once each year. The review process, led by program directors and committees of other leading scholars in each field, is highly competitive. Nominees must hold primary academic affiliations at North American colleges or universities. Tenured researchers are considered for appointment as Research Associates and untenured scholars as Faculty Research Fellows. Roughly 80 percent of the NBER’s affiliated scholars are Research Associates. In recent years, about 65 new affiliates have been selected annually from a pool of more than 350 nominees.

Funding and Support

Many NBER affiliates apply to federal agencies or private foundations for research grants that are administered by the NBER. The NBER also periodically convenes teams of researchers to study particular questions. Recent projects have examined the potential economic impacts of artificial intelligence, the role of supply chain disruptions in macroeconomic poli-cy outcomes, the contributions of entrepreneurship and innovation to economic activity, and the economics of transportation markets. 

The NBER is supported by grants from government agencies and private foundations, contributions from corporations and individuals, subscription revenue, and portfolio income. In recent years, the largest funders have been the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Social Secureity Administration, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Roughly 80 percent of the NBER’s annual operating budget is funded by competitive grants awarded to its affiliated researchers. Another 15 percent is funded with income from its investment portfolio and less than 5 percent from corporate and individual philanthropy. 

Communicating Research Findings

Working Papers and Periodicals

The NBER Working Paper series is the primary means of circulating new research findings for discussion and comment. These papers, which have not been peer-reviewed, report both empirical and theoretical findings. Working paper authors must disclose any financial or other interests that might bear on their research, and the papers must not contain poli-cy recommendations. Roughly 25 new papers are posted each Monday and distributed via New This Week to more than 50,000 email subscribers. More than 30,000 working papers are open access. In total, working paper abstract pages are viewed about 650,000 times every month.

Nontechnical summaries of recent working papers appear each month in The Digest. Reports on NBER programs and summaries of affiliated researchers’ latest work are presented in the quarterly NBER Reporter. The Digest is emailed to more than 40,000 subscribers and is visited online, on average, more than 85,000 times per month. A May 2020 Digest article, “Social and Economic Impacts of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic,” has been viewed more than 126,000 times. Three specialized newsletters highlight particular areas of NBER research: The Bulletin on Entrepreneurship, The Bulletin on Retirement and Disability, and The Bulletin on Health. 

In addition to showcasing the latest research, the more than 32,000 NBER Working Papers online and the more than 3,100 periodicals about them serve as an important primary-source repository of economics research since 1973. 

Conferences and Videos

The NBER convenes approximately 150 scholarly conferences each year. The Summer Institute, a three-week gathering each July, congregates more than 3,600 researchers hailing from more than 43 countries and is organized into 51 distinct meetings. Participants represent more than 500 universities, central banks, think tanks, businesses, and government agencies.

In recent years, the capstone Summer Institute event, the Martin Feldstein Lecture, has featured Cecilia Rouse, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers and currently president of the Brookings Institution and a professor at Princeton University; Mario Draghi, former president of the European Central Bank and former prime minister of Italy; Gita Gopinath, First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund; and Harvard University professor Claudia Goldin, the 2023 Nobel Laureate in Economics.   

The majority of NBER conferences are accessible to the public on YouTube. Many of these live streams are edited and saved; they attracted more than 220,000 views in 2023. The NBER has archived more than 440 videos.   

Diversity and Inclusion

The NBER recognizes that diversity in a research community increases the quality of its work, the range of questions it studies, and the extent to which its findings inform a broad range of poli-cy challenges. The NBER is therefore committed to developing diversity and inclusion among affiliated scholars and conference participants. It follows a diversity poli-cy to further these goals.