Six 2025 Robert Summers Fellowships Awarded

The NBER has awarded six Robert Summers fellowships to enable economic statisticians from government agencies and international organizations to attend the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth (CRIW) meeting on July 14–15, 2025, in Cambridge, MA. The fellows will participate in the meeting and have an opportunity to interact with leading scholars and practitioners in the field of economic measurement. 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 fellowship program 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 2025 fellowship recipients are: Thomas Anderson from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, Carmelita Esclanda from the Department of Economic Statistics at the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, Kelsey O'Flaherty from the Federal Reserve Board, Dominic Smith from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Dean Villanueva from the Asian Development Bank, and Romalahy Mande Isaora Zefania from the Madagascar Institut National de la Statistique. The fellows work on a range of issues concerning economic statistics, including international comparisons and price measurement.

The fellowship program, which promotes research on economic measurement and strengthens ties between the academics and practitioners, is ongoing.