Public Economics Program Meeting.

• Position: Bureau News

The NBER's Program on Public Economics met in Cambridge on April 6-7. Program Director James M. Poterba of MIT organized the meeting at which these papers were discussed:

Seth H. Giertz, Congressional Budget Office, "The Elasticity of Taxable Income During the 1990s: A Sensitivity Analysis"

Monica Singhal, Harvard University and NBER, and Adam Looney, Federal Reserve Board, "The Effect of Anticipated Tax Changes on Intertemporal Labor Supply and the Realization of Taxable Income"

Bruce D. Meyer, University of Chicago and NBER, and Bradley T. Helm, Duke University, "Identification and Estimation of Structural Modds of Labor Supply and Program Participation" (No discussants for these three papers.)

Joseph J. Doyle, Jr., MIT and NBER, and KrMert Samphantharak, University of California, San Diego, "$2.00 Gas! Studying the Effect of Gas Tax Moratorium"

Discussant: Andrew Samwick, Dartmouth College and NBER

Douglas A. Shackelford, University' of North Carolina and NBER; Zhonglan Dai and Harold H. Zhang, University of Texas; and Edward Maydew, University of North Carolina, "Capital Gains Taxes and Asset Prices: Capitalization or Lock-in?"

Discussant: Scott Weisbenner, University of Illinois and NBER

Robert Moflitt, John Hopkins University and NBER, "Welfare Work Requirements with Paternalistic Government Preferences"

Discussant: Emmanuel Saez, University of California, Berkeley and NBER

Amy Finkelstein, MIT and NBER, "The Aggregate Effects of Health Insurance: Evidence from the Introduction of Medicare"

Discussant: Jonathan Skinner, Dartmouth College and NBER

Raj Chetty, University of California, Berkeley and NBER, "Why Do Unemployment Benefits Raise Unemployment Durations ? Moral Hazard vs. Liquidity"

Discussant: Mark Duggan, University of Maryland and NBER

Stephen Coate, Cornell University and NBER, and Marco Battaglini, Princeton University, "A Dynamic Theory of Public Spending, Taxation, and Debt"

Discussant: Aleh Tsyvinski, Harvard University and NBER

Patrick Bayer, Yale University and NBER; Nathaniel Keohane, Yale University; and Chris Timmins, Duke University, "Migration and Hedonic Valuation : The Case of Air Quality"

Discussant: Kenneth Chay, University of California, Berkeley and NBER

Giertz examines alternative methodologies for measuring responses to the 1990 and 1993 federal tax increases. The methodologies build on those employed by Gruber and Saez (2002), Carroll (1998), Auten and Carroll (1999), and Feldstein (1995). Internal Revenue Service tax return data for the project are from the Statistics of Income, which heavily oversamples high-income filers. Special attention is paid to the importance of sample income restrictions and methodology. Estimates are broken down by income group to measure how responses to tax changes vary by income. In general, estimates are quite sensitive to a number of different factors. Using an approach similar to Carroll's yields elasticity of taxable income (ETI) estimates as high as 0.54 and as low as 0.03, depending on the income threshold for inclusion into the sample. Gruber and Saez's preferred specification yields estimates...