The NBER Summer Institute is a three-week megaconference that takes place every July in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It brings together thousands of economists from 50 subfields and over 400 institutions to participate in dozens of overlapping workshops. Agendas are built through an open call for papers and curated by over 150 organizers who select papers, invite discussants, and design sessions. Additional field-building activities include econometric methods lectures, research bootcamps for PhD students, first-timer breakfasts, late-afternoon networking events, and fellowships that support participation by faculty from minority-serving institutions. From 2026 to 2028, this grant will help pay for meeting rooms, audiovisual services, group meals, and other costs. Nearly all sessions and lectures are livestreamed and posted on the NBER YouTube channel. Together, these investments strengthen the economics profession by supporting intensive workshops, new collaborations, and broader access to frontier research.

What can improve the hiring and retention of care workers? Research led by Robert Goerge at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) will examine the labor market for childcare workers using linked data from multiple states. The project will construct a longitudinal dataset by combining administrative records, including childcare workers’ employment and wage histories as well as their educational credentials. The team will use variation in locations with different policy shifts—like local minimum wage increases or the rollout of universal pre-K—to estimate the threshold wage needed to retain childcare staff and identify any unintended consequences, such as daycare teachers being drawn away to work at local schools instead. The research will yield new evidence about labor policies in this critical sector.  Along with academic publications, expected outputs include interactive data dashboards that give states real-time insight into their childcare labor markets.