Concept
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is an American private nonprofit research organization "committed to undertaking and disseminating unbiased economic research among public policymakers, business professionals, and the academic community". The NBER is known for providing start and end dates for recessions in the United States. Many chairpersons of the Council of Economic Advisers were previously NBER Research Associates, including the former NBER president and Harvard Professor, Martin Feldstein. The NBER's president and CEO is James M. Poterba of MIT. The NBER was founded in 1920 by Malcolm Rorty and Nachum Stone. Its first staff economist and director of research was Wesley Clair Mitchell. The Russian American economist Simon Kuznets, a student of Mitchell, was working at the NBER when the U.S. government recruited him to oversee the production of the first official estimates of national income, published in 1934. In the early 1940s, Kuznets's work on national income became the basis of official measurements of GNP and other related indices of economic activity. The NBER is currently located in Cambridge, Massachusetts with a branch office in New York City. The NBER's research activities are mostly identified by 20 research programs on different subjects and 14 working groups. The research programs are: Economics of Aging, Asset Pricing, Children, Corporate Finance, Development Economics, Development of the American Economy, Economic Fluctuations and Growth, Economics of Education, Environment and Energy Economics, Health Care, Health Economics, Industrial Organization, International Finance and Macroeconomics, International Trade and Investment, Labor Studies, Law and Economics, Monetary Economics, Political Economy, Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship, and Public Economics. The working groups are: Behavioral Finance, Chinese Economy, Cohort Studies, Economics of Crime, Entrepreneurship, Risks of Financial Institutions, Household Finance, Innovation Policy, Insurance, Market Design, Organizational Economics, Personnel Economics, Race and Stratification in the Economy, and Urban Economics.
