Inaugural Robert Summers Fellows Will Attend CRIW Meeting

The NBER has awarded five fellowships to enable economic statisticians working in government statistical agencies and international organizations to attend the Conference on Research on Income and Wealth (CRIW) meeting to be held July 17-18 2023 in Cambridge, MA. The meeting will be part of the NBER 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 2023 fellowship recipients are: Kassu Hossiso, a research economist in the US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis; Cecilia Jona-Lasinio, professor of applied economics at Luiss Business School, Rome and a senior researcher at the Italian Institute of Statistics; Oscar Lemmers, an economist at Statistics Netherlands; Kirk White, an economist in the US Census Bureau’s Center for Economic Studies, and Matthew Unrath, chief of the Census Bureau’s Income Statistics Branch.

The fellowship program, which is expected to continue in future years, 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.