NBER celebrates 90 years.

• Position: NBER News

January 2010 marked the ninetieth anniversary of the founding of the NBER. On December 29, 1919, six economists--T.S. Adams (Yale University), John R. Commons (University of Wisconsin), Wesley Clair Mitchell (Columbia University), Malcolm Rorty (AT&T), Nachum Stone, and Allyn Young (Cornell University)--met at the LaSalle Hotel in Chicago during the annual meeting of the American Economics Association to draft the bylaws of a new organization that would conduct timely research on important economic issues. Several weeks later, on January 23, 1920, that new organization--the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)--was chartered as a nonprofit corporation doing business in New York. Edwin Gay, who was NBER's first president, was also the first Dean of the Harvard Business School. Wesley Clair Mitchell was the NBER's first Director of...