39th Annual NBER Summer Institute
The NBER hosted its 39th annual Summer Institute during a three-week period in July 2016. There were 2,763 registered participants, taking part in 54 distinct meetings led by 124 organizers. About one in five participants—554 researchers—were attending their first Summer Institute. There were 169 graduate student participants. Two thirds of the participants were not NBER affiliates.
Caroline Hoxby, who is the Scott and Donya Bommer Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the director of the NBER's Education Program, delivered the 2016 Martin Feldstein Lecture on "The Dramatic Economics of the U.S. Market for Higher Education." Her talk described the heterogeneity in the cost of delivering undergraduate education at different institutions, the differences in student test scores across schools, and the correlation between educational resources and student scores. Her analysis suggested that for a broad range of selective colleges and universities, the marginal productivity of additional resources devoted to undergraduate education is similar. An edited text of the lecture appears earlier in this issue of The NBER Reporter.
A panel discussion on the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom and its implications for global financial markets and economic growth drew a large turnout and provided participants with new insights on the consequences of this important change in international economic relations.
A group of five researchers—Al Roth of Stanford, Parag A. Pathak of MIT, Atila Abdulkadiroglu of Duke University, Nikhil Agarwal of MIT, and Itai Ashlagi of Stanford—presented the 2016 Methods Lectures on "The Theory and Practice of Market Design." They described the deferred acceptance algorithm that is widely used in designing rules for matching markets and explained how a number of such markets operate in practice.
All of the presentations—the Feldstein Lecture, the Brexit Panel, and the Methods Lectures—have been videotaped and can be accessed on the NBER website under the NBER Videos tab on the left side of the homepage.