Public economics program meeting.

• Position: National Bureau of Economic Research conference

Members of the NBER's program on Public Economics, directed by James M. Poterba of NBER and MIT, met in Cambridge on November 6 and 7. They discussed the following papers:

Alberto F. Alesina, NBER and Harvard University; Rexa Baqir, University of California, Berkeley; and William Easterly, The World Bank, "Public Goods and Ethnic Divisions" (NBER Working Paper No. 6009)

Discussant: Anne Case, NBER and Princeton University

Austan Goolsbee, NBER and University of Chicago, "What Happens When You Tax the Rich? Evidence from Executive Compensation"

Discussant: Brian Hall, NBER and Harvard University

Gary Becker, University of Chicago, and Casey Mulligan, NBER and University of Chicago, "Efficient Taxes, Efficient Spending, and Big Government"

Discussant: Robert P. Inmann, NBER and University of Pennsylvania

Jerry Hausman, NBER and MIT, "Taxation by Telecommunications Regulation" (NBER Working Paper No. 6260. For a summary of this paper, see "Tax Policy Conference" earlier in this issue.)

Discussant: William D. Nordhaus, NBER and Yale University

David Altig, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland; Alan J. Auerbach, NBER and University of California, Berkeley; Laurence J. Kotlikoff, NBER and Boston University; and Kent A. Smetters and Jan Walliser, Congressional Budget Office, "Simulating U.S. Tax Reform"

Discussant: Gilbert E. Metcalf, NBER and Tufts University

David A. Wise, NBER and Harvard University, and Jonathan Gruber, NBER and MIT, "Social Security Programs and Retirement Around the World" (NBER Working Paper No. 6134)

Discussant: Pierre Pestieau, Cornell University

Thomas J. Nechyba, NBER and Stanford University, "Social Approval, Values and AFDC: A Re-examination of the Illegitimacy Debate"

Discussant: Hilary W. Hoynes, NBEr and University of California, Berkeley

Alesina, Baqir, and Easterly present a model that links differences in preferences across ethnic groups in a city to the amount and type of public good the city supplies. They test the model with three related datasets: U.S. cities, U.S. metropolitan areas, and U.S. urban counties. They find that productive public goods - education, roads, libraries, sewers, and trash pickup - in U.S. cities (metro areas/urban counties) are inversely related to the city's (metro area's/county's) ethnic fragmentation. Ethnic fragmentation is related negatively to the share of local spending on welfare. The results are driven mainly by observations in which majority whites are reacting to varying sizes...