Labor studies.

• Position: Conference held on October 23, 1998

Program Director Richard B. Freeman and Lawrence F. Katz, both of NBER and Harvard University, organized a meeting of the NBER's Program on Labor Studies which took place in Cambridge on November 6, The following papers were presented:

Alan B. Krueger, NBER and Princeton University, and Stacy Dale, Mellon Foundation, "Estimating the Payoff to Attending a More Selective College: An Application of Selection on Observables and Unobservables"

V. Joseph Hotz and Guido W. Imbens, NBER and University of California, Los Angeles, and Julie Mortimer, University of California, Los Angeles, "Predicting the Efficacy of Future Training Programs Using Past Experiences"

Anne Preston, State University of New York, Stony Brook, "Sex, Kids, and Commitment to the Workplace: Employers, Employees, and the Mommy Track"

Steven J. Davis, NBER and University of Chicago, and Paul Willen, Princeton University, "Using Financial Assets to Hedge Labor Income Risks: Estimating the Benefits"

George J. Borjas, NBER and Harvard University, "Does Immigration Grease the Wheels of the Labor Market?"

David G. Blanchflower, NBER and Dartmouth College; Phillip B. Levine, NBER and Wellesley College; and David Zimmerman, Williams College, "Discrimination in the Small Business Credit Market" (NBER Working Paper No. 6840)

Using the newly collected College and Beyond (C&B) dataset, Krueger and Dale match students who were admitted to and rejected from a similar set of institutions in order to estimate the effect of college quality on students' subsequent earnings. They control for the average Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) score of the schools to which students applied; they find that students who attended colleges with higher average SAT scores do not earn more than other students who were accepted and rejected by comparable schools but attended a college with a lower average SAT score. However, the Barron's rating of school selectivity and the tuition charged by the school are related significantly to the students' subsequent earnings. The authors find a substantial internal rate of return from attending a more costly college. Further, the payoff to attending an elite college appears to be greater for students from more disadvantaged family backgrounds.

Hotz, Imbens, and Mortimer describe the problem of predicting the effect of a new training program based on experiences with previous implementations. There are two principal difficulties: first, the population for the new' program...