Robert Summers Fellows
The Robert Summers annual fellowships enable economic statisticians working in government statistical agencies and international organizations to attend the Conference on Research on Income and Wealth (CRIW) held annually in Cambridge, MA as part of Summer Institute.
The CRIW was founded in 1936 by Simon Kuznets to promote research and implementation of economic measurement. Its meetings provide opportunities for academic, government, and business economists to explore the latest developments in this field.
The fellowship program celebrates the intellectual legacy of long-time CRIW member and University of Pennsylvania professor Robert Summers, who pioneered the study of international price and output comparisons. Along with his colleagues Alan Heston and Irving Kravis, he developed the Penn World Table (PWT), a detailed compendium of national income account data and other information presented in comparable format, and measured in the same way, for many countries across many years. The initial PWT, developed by Summers and his collaborates Alan Heston and Irving Kravis, was a product of the United Nations International Comparison Program, which began with 10 countries and a reference year of 1970. It has subsequently grown to include 190 countries. It is a standard source of publicly available data on both output and prices and it is widely used in research on the determinants of cross-country growth.
The fellowship program aims to promote research on economic measurement and to strengthen ties between the academics and practitioners working in this area. Fellows will participate in the research meeting and have an opportunity to interact with leading scholars as well as other practitioners in the field of economic measurement.
The fellowship program is ongoing. A call for applications for 2025 Summers fellows is posted on the NBER website.
The 2024 fellowship recipients are: Flavio Calvino from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; Mahsa Gholizadeh from the US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis; Josh Martin from the Bank of England; Doron Sayag of Bar-Ilan University, previously the director of price measurement at the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics; Jakob Schneebacher from the UK Competition and Markets Authority; and Klaas de Vries from Statistics Netherlands. The fellows work on a range of issues, including international comparisons and price measurement.