41st Annual NBER Summer Institute.

• Position: NBER News

Researchers from 17 countries and 427 institutions participated in the NBER's 41st annual Summer Institute, which was held in Cambridge during a three-week period in July. More than 2,800 participants took part in 51 distinct meetings arranged by 120 organizers.

There were 185 graduate student participants, and 545 participants who were attending their first Summer Institute. More than 65 percent of the participants were not NBER affiliates. Researchers submitted 5,819 papers, of which 563 were selected for presentation.

Raghuram Rajan, the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, a former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, delivered the 2018 Martin Feldstein Lecture on "The Two Faces of Liquidity." His presentation described the role of credit access for households and firms in both the run-up to the 2008 global financial crisis and in the years following the crisis. Excessive liquidity prior to the crisis permitted mortgage lending with relatively weak standards and boosted asset prices. The sharp decline in credit after the crisis constricted both investment and consumer spending, placing an important drag on the pace of recovery. An edited text of the lecture appears earlier in this issue of the NBER Reporter.

The 2018 Methods Lectures, on "Weak Instruments and What to Do About Them," were presented by NBER...