Hi Everyone-
I hope you're all settling into your semesters. It was great to see so many
of you at the Summer Institute, and thanks again to Michael Greenstone and
Mar Reguant for organizing a terrific program.
Now that I have officially taken over from Don, I wanted to reach out on a
couple points.
1. *2017 Meetings.* Please mark your calendars for the Spring program
meeting on *March 3-4* (Friday-Saturday). It will take place in Cambridge,
MA, organized by Chris Knittel and Paulina Oliva. A call for papers will
come out soon. Please mark your calendars.
The Summer Institute will take place on *July 24-25*, organizers TBD. As in
previous years, the call for papers will come out in the beginning of 2017,
with papers due sometime in March.
2. *Future of the Program.* In general, my sense is that we have a highly
successful program. Our members are putting out a lot of working papers,
they're tackling important public policy issues, our conferences are well
attended, and we're running a number of special topics conferences, like this
one on distributional equity topics
<
http://conference.nber.org/confer/2016/EPTf16/program.html>. Huge, huge
thanks to Don for getting us to this point.
A number of you have asked me what I intend to do as program director. My
main intention is to listen to all of you. Please feel free to send me an
email, call me, or catch me at a conference if there's anything on your
mind. Also, I've set up a Google form
<
https://goo.gl/forms/kh8ghnbYR8qcsMXK2> to try to get an overall sense for
things. Please click through and let me know how you feel the program is
going in general, and tell me any specific suggestions for program meetings
or other issues going forward. It will take less than 10 seconds if you
simply click, "It's great," and likely less than 10 minutes for most of
you. No need to include your name.
Finally, I am in the process of constituting a steering committee to help
me organize program meetings and for more regular input. More on that
later.
3. *Grants and Working Papers.* I now understand just how closely the NBER
tracks metrics on our activities. On the margin, our members' contributions
affect program budgets and the number of new members we can invite. Towards
that end, I have two requests:
- Please make sure to release as many of your working papers as possible
through the NBER working paper series. The "Latest NBER Research" email
goes out to 25,000 recipients every week, so your paper will get
unprecedented exposure in the field. Personally, I am much more likely to
see papers on that list than in any journal email, particularly outside
EEE. Also, the popular press seems to be picking up more and more papers
from that list.
I realize that an increasing number of EEE members are submitting papers
to science journals that restrict circulating working paper versions. I'd
like to think about ways to make sure economists see those papers as well,
and I know that other NBER programs, such as health, are also facing this
issue. I'm curious to hear from you if you've had experience with one of
the science journals and/or have any thoughts on it.
- Please consider running grants through the NBER. In my experience, their
overhead rates are lower than most universities' and their ability to
process grants quickly is phenomenal. They offer a particular advantage if
you have multiple PIs from different institutions, or if you are at risk of
moving institutions (with NBER
you don't really need to "move" your grant money). Feel free to reach out
to me if you are thinking about it, and I can try to help you navigate the
process.
Thanks for reading to the end, and happy fall.
Take care,
Catherine
P.S. Thanks to Liran Einav from the NBER IO group for sharing the Google
form.
Received on Mon Sep 12 2016 - 20:15:51 EDT
