Dear NBER IO members,
This is a message that I originally sent back in February 2020, just
before Covid. At the time I received 2-3 initial responses, and then
everything got shut down, so I have been waiting until we are back to
normal before I resend it. Hopefully we are close enough to normal,
so it seems appropriate to send it again and gauge interest for the
coming academic year (and beyond).
I'm writing to gauge interest/demand for trying to identify a topic
area, and potential funding, for an IO-related NBER meeting, on top
of our winter program meeting and Summer Institute meeting.
The NBER hosts a number of meetings each year that are organized
around a particular theme, bringing together a smaller group of
scholars than a typical program meeting, and sometimes cutting across
multiple NBER programs. Some recent examples would be the conference
on "Megafirms" that Chad Syverson and John van Reenen organized in
Cambridge just before Covid. These meetings involve dedicated
funding, typically from a foundation funder. The process of convening
such a meeting therefore involves three steps: identifying a
promising topic, working with the NBER grants team to secure
financing for the meeting, and then organizing the conference. In
some cases, it may be possible to line up a publication outlet for
the papers presented at the meeting, such as a special issue of a journal.
If you are interested in potentially organizing a conference on a
particular topic, please send me one or two paragraphs describing
what you have in mind (topic area, why it is important, who the core
participants might be, etc.). I will collect all the ideas that come
in by November 15 (same as the submission deadline for the NBER IO
winter meeting), and then discuss them with Jim after that. This
would be a new initiative for NBER-IO, and I am mostly trying to get
a feel for whether IO program members are interested in this type of
activity under the NBER umbrella (there are many non-NBER such
activities). If you are one of those who sent me a proposal before
Covid, just update it and resend (if this is still relevant).
Please remember that NBER-sponsored activities cannot make policy
recommendations; it is great to suggest topics that are
policy-relevant, but not ones where the natural output of the papers
would be policy advice.
I look forward to seeing what type of ideas come up. Please send
suggestions and any follow up questions to me at leinav_at_stanford.edu.
Cheers,
Liran
Received on Thu Nov 10 2022 - 10:00:55 EST
