The NBER at 100: A Century-Long Search for Facts to Underpin Economic Policy
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) was founded one hundred years ago today — on January 23, 1920 — as a New York State nonprofit corporation. The founders, who were leaders in business and academia, declared that the organization would "encourage ... investigation, research, and discovery, and the application of knowledge... in the fields of economic, social, and industrial science." Its research program, formulated by founding Director of Research Wesley Clair Mitchell, focused on determining and reporting facts of relevance to economic policy, while adhering to the founders’ prescription to abstain from making policy recommendations.
In its first half century, the NBER supported a small group of researchers who carried out major projects on topics such as national income accounting, business cycle fluctuations, the measurement of monetary aggregates, and the role of human capital in labor markets, and who published their findings in NBER volumes. More recently, it has concentrated on convening groups of its more than 1,500 college- and university-based affiliates to conduct research, on hosting research colloquia, and on enabling grant-funded research by its affiliates.
Former Director of Research Solomon Fabricant described the NBER's founding and early years in a short history. Over the course of 2020, the NBER will host a series of events to consider current and future directions in economic research.