Four Robert Summers Fellowships Awarded

The NBER has awarded four Robert Summers fellowships that enable economic statisticians to attend the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth (CRIW) meeting on July 20–21, 2026, in Cambridge, MA. Founded in 1936 by Simon Kuznets, the CRIW provides a forum for academics, government representatives, and business economists to present and discuss the latest research in this area. The fellows will participate in the meeting, which is part of the NBER Summer Institute, and have an opportunity to interact with leading scholars and practitioners in the field of economic measurement. 

The fellowship program, which was launched in 2023, honors Robert Summers, a distinguished CRIW member and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who made substantial contributions to the study of international price and output comparisons. Summers, together with Alan Heston and Irving Kravis, developed the Penn World Table (PWT), a comprehensive dataset that provides consistent national income and economic data across a wide range of countries and years. Today, the PWT includes information from 190 countries and serves as a critical resource for cross-country economic analysis.

The 2026 fellowship recipients are: Dirk Van Duym of the Bureau of Economic Analysis, Christopher Goetz of the US Census Bureau, Hugh Montag of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Ben Rodriguez of the University of Maryland. The fellows’ interests range widely across the creation and application of economic statistics.