About NBER
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
NBER-affiliated researchers study a wide range of topics and they employ many different methods in their work. Key focus areas include developing new statistical measurements, estimating quantitative models of economic behavior, and analyzing the effects of public policies.
About SAIF
The Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance (SAIF) was established by the Shanghai Municipal Government at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in April 2009. Its mission is to become a world class institute of research and higher learning with world class faculty. SAIF is committed to developing top talents for the financial world and to generate cutting-edge knowledge in financial theories and applications. As a member of Shanghai's financial community, it strives to contribute to the development of Shanghai as a global financial center.
Call for Papers
The Fourth Biennial NBER-SAIF Research Conference
AI and Financial Markets
June 15-16, 2026
(US Eastern Time)
Virtual
The advent of artificial intelligence is widely viewed as one of the most important economic developments of our time. It has the potential to transform capital and labor markets and to affect the rate of productivity growth on a global scale. Experts describe a range of scenarios for the technology’s impact on the real economy as well as financial markets, but there many important remain open questions. To promote research on the financial market effects of AI, drawing on the experience to date with investment, labor productivity, and innovation, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and the Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance (SAIF) at Shanghai Jiao Tong University plan to focus their fourth biennial joint research conference on this topic. This conference series, launched in 2018, promotes economic research on public policies and other developments that bear on financial markets, particularly on topics that are of interest in both China and the United States. It brings together rigorous, current research by leading international scholars and policy experts.
The conference program will consist of both invited presentations and contributed papers focusing on how AI is affecting financial markets. The program will be organized by James Poterba (MIT and NBER) and Yongxiang Wang (SAIF). The meeting will include research papers that touch on financial market effects of AI, broadly defined. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- The impact of investment in AI and supporting technologies, such as electric power infrastructure, on corporate earnings and share prices through direct effects of investment spending as well as follow-on effects on labor productivity and innovation.
- The effects of AI on the portfolio choices and trading behavior of various financial market participants, including retail investors, high-frequency institutional investors, and long-horizon investors such as pension funds and sovereign wealth funds.
- The role of AI in creating new measures of economic activity that might supplement or in time replace traditional measures of economic and financial market activity.
- The uses of AI in the design and implementation of financial market regulation and in the monitoring and detection of financial risks more generally.
- The consequences of AI for the financial advice industry.
- The macroeconomic effects of AI on economy-wide discount rates through channels such as the rate of aggregate productivity growth and shifts in the distribution of wealth and income.
The conference will emphasize papers that provide either theoretical analysis of, or empirical evidence on, ways in which AI has affected, or may affect, capital markets and their participants. The organizers are particularly interested in papers that address topics that have cross-cutting interest in both China and the United States. Papers by researchers who are early in their careers and by researchers who do not have affiliations with either the NBER or SAIF are welcome.
To submit a paper for potential presentation, please send a PDF file no later than 11:59pm ET on Thursday, February 26, 2026 (12:59pm on Friday February 27, 2026 in Shanghai) to nber@saif.sjtu.edu.cn.
The virtual conference will be held in two segments, one from 8:00–11:00pm (US Eastern Time) on Monday June 15, 2026, the other from 8:00–11:00am ET on Tuesday June 16, 2026. Please address questions about this meeting to nber@saif.sjtu.edu.cn.
To submit a paper for potential presentation, please send a PDF file no later than 11:59pm ET on Thursday, February 26, 2026 (12:59pm on Friday February 27, 2026 in Shanghai) to nber@saif.sjtu.edu.cn .
