March 31, 2004

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Dear 7,

This is to confirm your participation in the NBER's conference on Tax Policy and the Economy.

The conference will be held in Washington, DC on Thursday, October 7, 2004 and the papers will be published as Volume 19 in the NBER's Tax Policy and the Economy series (MIT Press). I have tentatively put down your title as " ". I suspect that you may want to amend the title as we get closer to the event.

You probably know that the object of the conference is to make current developments

in economic research accessible to the tax policy-making community. Following the

NBER strictures, of course, you should avoid making policy recommendations. The audience consists of Congressional staff members, government officials from departments such as the Treasury, OMB, CEA, members of the corporate community specializing in taxation, and corporate chief economists.

In light of the conference's non-standard audience, there has customarily been more of a pre-conference editorial process than for scientific conferences. The deadline for a first draft of you paper is Friday, August 13. I would propose to return the draft to you with comments by Monday, August 30 at the latest. The conference draft would be due on Friday, September 17 and final revisions would be due Monday, October 25. Because we aim to produce the published volume in a timely manner, the final version of your paper should really be final, as you will only get about two weeks after the conference for any necessary minor revisions.

At the conference, authors should take about half an hour to present their papers, and there are no assigned discussants. The remaining time is devoted to comments and questions from the audience. The meeting will be held in a large conference room, so if you are planning to use overheads or other media please make sure that it will be readable to the participants at the back of the room.