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Because the EEE program is new, and many members are new to NBER, I thought I would share with you a question from one of our members, and my reply. BTW, anybody who has just become a new RA or FRF may have several working papers already finished, and in circulation. If those are not yet published, you can go now and submit any of them as NBER working papers. To do so, go to http://www.nber.org/ and login using your username and password, and then the home page will have a place for you to click on "Info for NBER Family members" where you can submit a working paper online. ... Anyway, here is the question put to me:
"When to submit through my own university and when to submit through NBER is a bit vague. If all the work is at my university, then it seems it should get submitted there. If it involves multiple universities then NBER is logical. It is a little unclear to me."
And my response: If your question is about submission of working papers, then the answer is easy: any of your papers ready for circulation can appear both in your university or department working paper series and in the NBER wp series. No conflict. The NBER has extremely wide circulation, to university libraries, SSRN, EconLit, etc., so I think that is very much in your interest.
If your question is about submission of grant proposals, then you are right that there exists some grey area in the middle where you have to make your own judgments. If the project is all with others at your own university, then it should probably be submitted through the university. If it is all with NBER researchers at other universities, then it should be submitted through NBER. But other proposals fall between those two extremes. By the way, even if some of the co-PI's are not currently affiliated with NBER, your grant CAN be handled by NBER, which can pay summer salary to those researchers, even non-economists. NBER provides great fringe benefits and can do all the paperwork for you other than write the proposal itself.
While you consider how to run your next proposal, also bear in mind that while your primary academic affiliation is with your university, you also have an affiliation with other academic colleagues at NBER, and that NBER does provide infrastructure that helps facilitate your research (e.g. circulation of working papers, paying your travel to program meetings and summer institutes, providing an office if you ever want to visit, and grant specialists who do all the paper work for you). For these reasons, two of my prior individual NSF proposals (with no other co-PI) were run thru NBER with a subcontract to my university, with one month per summer in each budget, so that they each would get some overhead. (NBER does not charge overhead on the subcontract). And the university was happy to get the funding, so no complaints.
Thanks. Don
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