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Description
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 well known for providing start and end dates for recessions in the United States.
Many of the Chairmen of the Council of Economic Advisers have been NBER Research Associates, including the former NBER President and Harvard Professor, Martin Feldstein.
The NBER's current President and CEO is Professor James M. Poterba of MIT.
History
The NBER was founded in 1920. Its first staff economist, director of research, and one of its founders was American economist Wesley Clair Mitchell. He was succeeded by Malcolm C. Rorty in 1922.
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.
