Call for Proposals
NBER-Sloan Project on the Global Financial Crisis
A research project to understand international aspects of the recent crisis
Kristin Forbes, Jeffrey Frankel, and Charles Engel, organizers
The Sloan Foundation has generously funded a
project organized by the NBER on global aspects
of the recent financial crisis. The project seeks
to motivate new thinking about the global
financial crisis and to provide a forum for
academic researchers to discuss these ideas. It
will provide a new body of research to advance
our understanding of the mechanisms that led to
the most severe global crisis since the Great
Depression. This research should provide the
intellectual underpinnings for policies to better
manage and hopefully to reduce the likelihood of future financial crises.
This project will pay a stipend for new research
papers on topics answering questions such as: How
did global imbalances contribute to the crisis?
How was the crisis transmitted internationally?
How has the global nature of the crisis affected
macroeconomic policy responses, ranging from
monetary and fiscal policy to banking regulation
and the role of the dollar? Priority will be
given to projects that are data intensive
(involving the creation of new data or using
existing data in new ways) and that have
implications for policy. The research will be
discussed at a series of conferences in
Cambridge, MA, Washington, DC, and likely Bretton
Woods, NH. The papers produced for the project
will be considered for publication in a special
symposium in the Journal of International Economics.
Project and Conference Details: About 12
proposals will be selected for inclusion in this
project. Authors will receive an honorarium of
$5000 per completed paper. Papers that involve
the creation of new datasets or substantial new
data-intensive work that is made publically
available will also be eligible for an additional
honorarium (up to $5000 per paper based on
project characteristics). In addition to their
research papers, authors will also be expected to
prepare a short 1-3 page non-technical summary of
their paper. All travel expenses related to the
project will be covered, subject to the usual NBER guidelines.
The proposals and initial work on the papers will
be discussed at a pre-conference in the
afternoons of July 14-15 in Cambridge, MA in
conjunction with the NBER Summer Institute.
Completed research papers will be discussed at an
academic conference, likely held on June 3-4,
2011 in Bretton Woods, NH. To distill these
research insights for policymakers, summaries of
selected papers will be presented at a short
conference in Washington, DC before an audience
of officials from central banks, finance
ministries, international institutions and
financial markets. This event will be held in
September 2011 (in conjunction with the annual IMF-World Bank meetings).
Research papers from this project will be
included in the NBER working paper series and
distributed through the extensive NBER research
distribution network, including highlights in the
NBER Reporter and the NBER Digest. The research
papers, non-technical summaries, and associated
data will be available on the NBER web site.
Authors are required to submit their papers to be
considered for inclusion in the symposium in the
Journal of International Economics, subject to the normal refereeing process.
Proposal Information and Topics: Proposals should
be submitted by April 19, 2010 to
http://www.nber.org/confsubmit/backend/cfp?id=GFCs10.
Any questions should be sent to Kristin Forbes at
kjforbes_at_mit.edu. Proposals should be at least
3-5 pages long and include: (1) the question that
will be answered in the paper; (2) how this fits
with existing academic literature; (3) what
framework will be used to answer the questions;
(4) a description of any data that will be used;
(5) what implications the paper will have for
policy; and (5) a brief timeline for completion
of the paper. Any related work by the author(s)
should also be referenced. Authors selected to
participate in the project will be notified by mid-May of 2010.
The project will focus on a wide range of issues
related to international aspects of the global
financial crisis. When selecting which proposals
are included in the project, preference will be
given to studies that are empiricalespecially
those that involve the creation of new data sets
and/or that introduce academics to new data that
have not been widely used. Authors from academic
institutions may find it useful to partner with
researchers at institutions with access to or
expertise in international datasuch as the
Federal Reserve, BIS, IMF, World Bank, etc.
Preference will also be given to topics that
address issues of relevance to policymakers. This
does not mean that the papers should prescribe
policies, but instead that they provide the
frameworks, tools, and/or insights that are
useful in the formulation of policy.
Suggestions for questions we hope to address are
included in the attachment, but we are also open
to proposals on topics not included in this list
as long as they are related to international aspects of the crisis.
Received on Thu Jan 28 2010 - 08:19:22 EST
