Program meeting on labor studies.

• Position: National Bureau of Economic Research conference

Fifty members and guests of the NBER's Program in Labor Studies met in Cambridge on November 14 to discuss some of their recent research. Program Director Richard B. Freeman and Research Associate Lawrence F. Katz, both of NBER and Harvard University, organized and meeting at which the following papers were discussed:

Lawrence F. Katz: Jeffrey Kling, MIT; and Jeffrey Liebman, NBER and Harvard University, "Do Housing Mobility Programs Work? The Impact of Moving to Opportunity on Boston Families"

Bruce D. Meyer, NBER and Northwestern University, and Dan T. Rosenbaum, Northwestern University, "Welfare, the EITC, and Women's Labor Supply"

Eli Berman, NBER and Boston University, and Zaur Rzakhanov, Brandeis University, "Migration and Fertility"

David Card, NBER and University of California, Berkeley, and Abigail Payne, University of Toronto, "School Finance Reform, the Distribution of School Spending, and the Distribution of SAT Scores"

James J. Heckman, NBER and University of Chicago; Lance Lochner, University of Chicago; and Christopher Taber, Northwestern University, "Rising Wage Inequality and the Effectiveness of Tuition Subsidy Policies: Exploration with a Dynamic General Equilibrium Model of Labor Earnings"

Katz, Kling, and Liebman examine the short-run impacts of a change in residential neighborhood on the well-being of low-income families. They look at the experiences of 540 families at the Boston site of Moving To Opportunity (MTO), a demonstration program currently underway in five cities. Families in eligible public housing projects in high poverty Census tracts can apply to MTO and are assigned by lottery to one of three groups. The Experimental group receives some counseling assistance and a Section 8 rental subsidy that can be used to move to a Census tract that had a poverty rate of less than 10 percent in 1990. The Section 8 Comparison group receives a geographically unrestricted rental subsidy. The Control group continues in public housing and receives no new rental assistance or services. The authors find that one to three years after participants enter the program, both Experimental and Section 8 Comparison families are fairly successful in using their subsidies to move out of high poverty neighborhoods: 48 percent of Experimental and 58 percent of Section 8 Comparison families move through the program. The Experimental group is much more likely to move to suburban and other wealthier communities, while regular Section 8...