The NBER Summer Institute, which takes place in Cambridge, MA over a three week span each July, brings together economists from colleges, universities, governments, and international organizations for interaction including lectures, workshops, and cooperative research. The program is designed to encourage participants to interact with one another, and to include newly minted Ph.Ds. and advanced graduate students. The research presentations span most of the sub-fields of economics. The NBER Summer Institute meetings raise the quality of economic research by enabling scholars to collect comments from expert audiences and to develop new topics for study by interacting with their peers. The meeting also advances cross-field collaboration within economics, by bringing together scholars with related interests who might not otherwise interact.