NBER selects James M. Poterba as next president.

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In February 2008, the NBER's Board of Directors selected James M. Poterba as the NBER's next President and Chief Executive Officer. He will succeed Martin Feldstein, who has led the NBER since 1977, and will assume the post on July 1, 2008. Poterba is currently the Director of the NBER's Program on Public Economics and the Mitsui Professor of Economics, and economics department head, at MIT.

Poterba began his association with the NBER in 1978, during his sophomore year at Harvard College. He was hired as a research assistant, working primarily with Martin Feldstein and Lawrence Summers on a range of projects involving capital income taxation. He also assisted NBER Research Associate Victor Zarnowitz in analyzing data collected as part of the American Statistical Association-NBER Survey of Economic Forecasters. Poterba went on to graduate studies at Nuffield College, Oxford, where he received a D.Phil. degree in Economics.

He was appointed an NBER Faculty Research Fellow in the Business Taxation and Finance Program in 1982, and promoted to NBER Research Associate in 1985. In 1989, he was selected to be the Associate Director of what by then had been renamed the Program on Taxation, working with inaugural Program Director David Bradford. In 1991, when Bradford was appointed to the President's Council of Economic Advisers, Poterba took over as Director of the newly renamed Program on Public Economics. He also assumed the editorship of the Tax Policy and the Economy series, a set of annual volumes containing the papers presented at an NBER conference in Washington that brings recent research in public economics to the attention of policymakers.

During his time as Program Director for the Public Economics Program, Poterba has led a number of taxation-related NBER projects on such topics as: the International Comparison of Tax-Based Saving Incentives; Residential Real Estate; the Tax-Exempt Bond Market; Behavioral Responses to Taxation; and the Economic Analysis of Tax Expenditures. His own research has ranged widely across issues involving tax policy, financial markets, and retirement saving. His early work applied rational expectations insights about asset markets to analyzing how house prices and housing construction would be affected by changes in the tax treatment of owner-occupied housing. Throughout his career, he also has been interested in taxation and housing markets. Currently, he and Todd Sinai are studying how...