Dear NBER Family Members:
As the academic year gets under way, I would like to bring you up to
date on a number of recent NBER developments.
Nearly 1800 researchers, about 650 of whom are NBER affiliates, took
part in the 2008 NBER Summer Institute -- the largest attendance ever.
The participants hailed from 325 different institutions, and included
approximately 150 graduate students. One of the highpoints was the July
24 celebration of Marty Feldstein's three decades of NBER leadership. I
am grateful to the more than one hundred NBER affiliates who proposed
captions for the untitled "King Kong" cartoon that I circulated in
mid-July. I conducted a relatively informal poll of Summer Institute
participants after receiving your suggestions, and the most popular
caption was Mike Rothschild's submission: "Some stand on the shoulders
of giants, others on the work of graduate students." If you would like
to see the other highly-ranked captions, as well as the four cartoons
that we commissioned for Marty, a chronology of NBER events that was
prepared for the July 24 dinner, and some photos from the NBER Board of
Directors' early September tribute for Marty, you can visit the NBER
family page:
http://www.nber.org/family/feldstein_tribute/index.html
Many of you know that Marty has become the NBER's President
Emeritus, a role that will enable him to remain active in a wide range
of research projects. The NBER Board of Directors has also voted to
establish a Martin Feldstein Lecture that will take place each year
during the Summer Institute, and to name the second floor conference
room at 1050 Massachusetts Avenue the Martin Feldstein Conference Room.
At the close of the NBER Board's September meeting, John Clarkeson,
the former Chairman of the Boston Consulting Group, became the Chairman
of our board. He succeeds Betsy Bailey of the Wharton School at the
University of Pennsylvania. Kathleen Cooper, a Senior Fellow at the
John Tower Center at Southern Methodist University, is the board's new
Vice-Chair. The board also elected two new members: John Reed, the
former Chairman of Citicorp, and Mohamad El-Erian, the CEO of investment
firm PIMCO. I am delighted that all of our board members are willing to
devote time and energy to the oversight of the NBER.
There have been a number of recent developments with regard to our
programs and working groups. Raj Chetty, of the University of
California at Berkeley, and Amy Finkelstein, of MIT, have agreed to
serve as co-directors of the NBER Public Economics Program. Susan
Athey, of Harvard, and Parag Pathak, of MIT, have agreed to serve as the
inaugural co-leaders of an NBER working group on Market Design. That
group will hold its first meeting sometime during this academic year.
Jeffrey Brown, of the University of Illinois, is the new organizer for
the NBER's annual Tax Policy and the Economy conference, a Washington
meeting at which current research findings are presented to a
policy-maker audience. As usual, we have a very busy schedule of fall
program meetings and conferences. Please consult the conference
calendar on the NBER family page for more detail.
All best wishes for a productive and successful fall semester. I
hope that you will let me know if you have suggestions for improving the
way the NBER functions, or ideas for new research projects that we
should undertake. Thank you for your continued involvement in and
support of NBER activities.
Jim
Received on Tue Sep 23 2008 - 14:02:36 EDT
