42nd Annual NBER Summer Institute

Researchers from 40 countries and 474 institutions participated in the 42nd annual NBER Summer Institute, which was held in Cambridge over a three-week period in July. Nearly 2,900 participants took part in 52 distinct meetings arranged by 104 organizers.

There were 575 first-time participants, and 224 graduate students, at the 2019 Summer Institute. About two-thirds of the participants were not NBER affiliates. Researchers submitted 2,990 distinct papers, of which 547 were included on the program.

Katherine Baicker, dean and Emmett Dedmon Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, delivered the 2019 Martin Feldstein Lecture on “Economic Analysis for Evidence-Based Health Policy: Progress and Pitfalls.” Her presentation described both the importance of integrating empirical evidence on the behavior of prospective patients and health care providers into the design of health care policies and the challenges of doing so. An edited text of her lecture appears earlier in this issue of the NBER Reporter.

Edward Miguel, the Oxfam Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley presented the 2019 Methods Lecture, speaking on “Research Transparency and Reproducibility.” His talk offered a number of strategies for improving the documentation associated with empirical projects in economics, and thereby enhancing the capacity for replication.