Formatting Guidelines: your paper should have 1 inch margins, use one and a half or double spacing, use 12pt font size or larger, and be on 8 1/2 by 11 in paper. If at all possible, please use a standard font such as Times Roman.

The University of Chicago Press has excellent advice on the preparation of manuscripts in Word and Word Perfect with special instructions for making tables and Mathematical text. These are not requirements for NBER Working Papers but will generally result in higher quality reproduction and will ease any subsequent conversion to publication format.

(1) Use the Distiller from Acrobat 4.05 or better.
(2) Select 'Embed all fonts' (on the Distiller Settings | Job Options | fonts menu)
(3) Select Settings | Edit Adobe PDF Settings | Compatability | Adobe 5.0

Otherwise Acrobat may include font references in the PDF file to fonts on your computer that may not be available on other computers. Instead of Acrobat PDF995 works well in its default setup and is free (or nearly so).

You can check your output for portability if you uncheck the 'Use local fonts' option of the 'View' menu of Acrobat while examining the resulting file for missing elements (especially symbols, ligatures, Greek letters, brackets, etc but sometimes elements as common as commas).

A detailed document describing how to create portable PDF files is on the National Science Foundation web site here to aid applicants in the submission of NSF grant applications. They also supply a 'Job Options' file here that configures your Acrobat software to generate files that will display and print correctly on any client computer. The default configuration for Acrobat does not do this. We are happy to accept documents formatted according to the NSF guidelines, so feel free to use the Fastlane job options file for us.

After your paper has been converted to PDF, you will receive an e-mail from Laura Bethard with a link to an electronic copy of your paper. She will ask you to review the PDF version to make sure that your paper (especially your equations) were not altered in the conversion. Thank you for taking the time to do this. If you do not respond to her e-mail, your paper will be posted.

The submission form can be found here

If you have questions about a working paper you already submitted, please contact Laura Bethard at (617)588-1403 or bethardl@nber.org

From time to time users of the NBER web site complain that certain working papers (not prepared according to the guidlines above) are garbled or are missing elements. When this occurs we try to work with the author to obtain a clean copy of the paper, but if this proves impossible we can scan the paper and place an image file on the webserver. Image files are large and download an order of magnitude more slowly - up to 20 minutes for dialup users. For this reason, we hope to minimize the use of scanned PDF files.