Summer Institute 2024

More than 2,700 researchers, hailing from 40 countries, traveled to Cambridge for the 47th annual NBER Summer Institute, which was held over the three week period July 8–26. Nearly 490 additional researchers registered to participate virtually. The Summer Institute consisted of 49 distinct meetings and workshops arranged by 143 organizers. Most of the meetings also were streamed on the NBER’s YouTube channel.

The in-person participants represented 455 universities, central banks, think tanks, businesses, and government agencies. Only about one third were NBER affiliates, and nearly 500 were first-time Summer Institute participants. 

The 582 research papers presented during the course of the Summer Institute were selected from 3,575 submissions — an acceptance rate of about 16 percent. 

Cecilia E. Rouse, the president of the Brookings Institution, a Princeton faculty member, and the past chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, delivered the 2024 Martin Feldstein Lecture on “Lessons for Economists from the Pandemic.” Her presentation highlighted the challenges to policy design when there was great uncertainty about the public health trajectory of COVID-19 and described policy trade-offs associated with some of the key pandemic-era policies. A recording of her lecture, as well as a transcript, can be found on the NBER website. 

NBER Research Associates Susan Athey and Guido Imbens of Stanford University presented the 2024 Methods Lectures on “Analysis and Design of Multi-Armed Bandit Experiments and Policy Learning” and “Inference and Spillovers in Randomized Experiments.” Their lectures described both the econometric theory behind, and the application of, a range of new tools for experimental design in economics as well as other fields.