Founded by Malcolm Rorty and Nachum Stone, the NBER aimed to fill the information gap on economic data.

The NBER's initial projects included measuring labor's share of national income and studying unemployment and business-cycle fluctuations.

The NBER convenes over 120 meetings each year at which researchers share and discuss their latest findings and launch new projects.

[8] In a 2010 report by the University of Pennsylvania, the NBER was ranked as the second most influential domestic economic policy think tank (the first was the Brookings Institution).

[10] The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) does not function as a real-time arbiter in determining the onset and duration of recessions but rather serves as a retrospective marker.

[11] The origins of this role can be traced to the 1960s when the Commerce Department began publishing a digest that relied on NBER's analysis of the business cycle.

First, they feel by measuring a wide range of economic factors, rather than just GDP, a more accurate assessment of the health of an economy can be gained.

Second, since the NBER wishes to measure the duration of economic expansion and recession at a fine grain, they place emphasis on monthly—rather than quarterly—economic indicators.

[16] Though not listed by the NBER, another factor in favor of this alternate definition is that a long-term economic contraction may not always have two consecutive quarters of negative growth, as was the case in the recession following the bursting of the dot-com bubble.

[15] In September 2010, after a conference call with its Business Cycle Dating Committee, the NBER declared that the Great Recession in the United States had officially ended in 2009 and lasted from December 2007 to June 2009.

[17][18] In response, a number of newspapers wrote that the majority of Americans did not believe the recession was over, mainly because they were still struggling and because the country still faced high unemployment.

[19][20][21] However, the NBER release had noted that "In determining that a trough occurred in June 2009, the committee did not conclude that economic conditions since that month have been favorable or that the economy has returned to operating at normal capacity.