NBER Website Has Over 10,000 Working Papers

The NBER has now published over 10,000 titles in its Working Paper Series. Virtually all of these papers are available at www.nber.org/papers. The papers are free to residents of third world countries, who generate about one third of our 4,000 daily downloads.

Finding hard copies of the early papers, which did not exist in electronic format, involved some detective work on the part of NBER Research Associate Dan Feenberg and his assistant Inna Shapiro. As Feenberg describes: "When we started putting up the full text of Working Papers in 1996, there was no question in my mind that we wanted to have all working papers back to Number 1 online, but the cost was an obstacle. I did realize that we would get requests for older papers, so we put a note on the website offering to scan and make available any paper for $10. This was surprisingly successful, in that anywhere from 5 to 20 requests came in each week, and my assistant Inna Shapiro scanned them in-house."

Nonetheless, he continues, "almost 100 papers were completely missing from our files. We found about 60 of them at Harvard's Littauer Library and many of the remaining ones at MIT. The IMF Library came up with five papers, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia's Library with three, including the crucial NBER Working Paper Number 1, a 132-page blockbuster. At the moment, the only paper clearly still missing is Number 25, "The Covariance Stucture of Earnings and the On the Job Training Hypothesis" by John Hause, issued in December 1973. (So, if you have a copy, we'd like to borrow it.)"

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