About

Lawrence Katz is the Elisabeth Allison Professor of Economics at Harvard University. The page provides information about his role, contact details, and a list of his former Ph.D. students, but does not include specific details about his research focus, background, or key contributions. Therefore, no detailed biography is available from the provided text.

Research topics

• Economics
• Sociology
• Demographic economics
• Psychology
• Business
• Econometrics
• Labour economics

Selected publications

• Race, Ethnicity, and Economic Statistics for the 21st Century

  2025-04-07 · 1 citations

  book
  PublisherDOI

• The Economics of Immigration: A Festschrift in Honor of George J. Borjas

  Industrial and Labor Relations Review · 2024-07-24

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self Sufficiency Next Generation (BIAS-NG), Wayne County Head Start Attendance

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2024-03-29

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  PublisherDOI

• Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self Sufficiency Next Generation (BIAS-NG), Wayne County Head Start Attendance

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2024-03-29

  datasetSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self Sufficiency Next Generation (BIAS-NG): Los Angeles County, Child Welfare

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2024-01-05

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  PublisherDOI

• Creating Moves to Opportunity: Experimental Evidence on Barriers to Neighborhood Choice

  American Economic Review · 2024-04-30 · 87 citations

  article

  Low-income families often live in low-upward-mobility neighborhoods. We study why by using a randomized trial with housing voucher recipients that provided information, financial support, and customized search assistance to move to high-opportunity neighborhoods. The treatment increased the fraction moving to high-upward-mobility areas from 15 to 53 percent. A second trial reveals this treatment effect is driven primarily by customized search assistance. Qualitative interviews show that the intervention relaxed bandwidth constraints and addressed family-specific needs. Our findings imply many low-income families do not have strong preferences to stay in low-opportunity areas and that barriers in housing search significantly increase residential segregation by income. (JEL D83, G51, R21, R23, R31, R38)

  PublisherDOI

• Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self Sufficiency Next Generation (BIAS-NG): Los Angeles County, Child Welfare

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2024-01-05

  datasetSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• “When Someone Cares About You, It’s Priceless”: Reducing Administrative Burdens and Boosting Housing Search Confidence to Increase Opportunity Moves for Voucher Holders

  RSF The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences · 2023-08-03 · 21 citations

  articleOpen access

  Using in-depth interview data from families and service providers, we examine the success of the Creating Moves to Opportunity (CMTO) program in Seattle, focusing on how it reduced many of the learning, compliance, and psychological costs of using housing vouchers so that participants could expand their residential choices. CMTO’s approach of combining information and flexible financial resources with personalized high-quality assistance bolstered participants’ confidence, agency, and optimism for their housing searches in high-opportunity neighborhoods. Accessible, collaborative, pertinent communication from program staff was central to addressing both the psychological costs of the federal Housing Choice Voucher program and families’ experiences in housing and social services. These results provide evidence to inform housing policy as well as to enrich broader scholarship on program take-up, implementation research, and the role of Navigators and service quality in addressing administrative burdens low-income families face while using other social programs.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Why Do Sectoral Employment Programs Work? Lessons from WorkAdvance

  Journal of Labor Economics · 2022-04-01 · 69 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This paper examines the evidence from randomized evaluations of sector-focused training programs that target low-wage workers and combine up-front screening, occupational and soft-skills training, and wraparound services. The programs generate substantial and persistent earnings gains (12%–34%) following training. Theoretical mechanisms for program impacts are explored for the WorkAdvance demonstration. Earnings gains are generated by getting participants into higher-wage jobs in higher-earning industries and occupations, not just by raising employment. Training in transferable and certifiable skills (likely underprovided from poaching concerns) and reductions of employment barriers to high-wage sectors for nontraditional workers appear to play key roles.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication Data for: The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment

  Harvard Dataverse · 2022-01-28

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  </p>This dataset contains replication files for "The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment" by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and Lawrence Katz. For more information, see <a href="https://opportunityinsights.org/paper/newmto/">https://opportunityinsights.org/paper/newmto/</a>. A summary of the related publication follows.</p> <hr/> <p>There are large differences in individuals’ economic, health, and educational outcomes across neighborhoods in the United States. Motivated by these disparities, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development designed the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment to determine whether providing low-income families assistance in moving to better neighborhoods could improve their economic and health outcomes.</p> <p>The MTO experiment was conducted between 1994 and 1998 in five large U.S. cities. Approximately 4,600 families living in high-poverty public housing projects were randomly assigned to one of three groups: an experimental voucher group that was offered a subsidized housing voucher that came with a requirement to move to a census tract with a poverty rate below 10%, a Section 8 voucher group that was offered a standard housing voucher with no additional contingencies, and a control group that was not offered a voucher (but retained access to public housing).</p> <p>Previous research on the MTO experiment has found that moving to lower-poverty areas greatly improved the mental and physical health of adults. However, prior work found no impacts of the MTO treatments on the earnings of adults and older youth, leading some to conclude that neighborhood environments are not an important component of economic success.</p> <p>In this study, we present a new analysis of the effect of the MTO experiment on children’s long-term outcomes. Our re-analysis is motivated by new research showing that a neighborhood’s effect on children’s outcomes may depend critically on the duration of exposure to that environment. In particular, Chetty and Hendren (2015) use quasi-experimental methods to show that every year spent in a better area during childhood increases a child’s earnings in adulthood, implying that the gains from moving to a better area are larger for children who are younger at the time of the move.</p> <p>In light of this new evidence on childhood exposure effects, we study the long-term impacts of MTO on children who were young when their families moved to better neighborhoods. Prior work has not been able to examine these issues because the younger children in the MTO experiment are only now old enough to be entering the adult labor market.</p> <p>For older children (those between ages 13-18), we find that moving to a lower-poverty neighborhood has a statistically insignificant or slightly negative effect. More generally, the gains from moving to lower-poverty areas decline steadily with the age of the child at the time of the move. We do not find any clear evidence of a “critical age” below which children must move to benefit from a better neighborhood. Rather, every extra year of childhood spent in a low-poverty environment appears to be beneficial, consistent with the findings of Chetty and Hendren (2015).</p> <p>The MTO treatments also had little or no impact on adults’ economic outcomes, consistent with previous results. Together, these studies show that childhood exposure plays a critical role in neighborhoods’ effects on economic outcomes.</p> <p>The experimental voucher increased the earnings of children who moved at young ages in all five experimental sites, for Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics, and for boys and girls. Perhaps most notably, we find robust evidence that the experimental voucher improved long-term outcomes for young boys, a subgroup where prior studies have found little evidence of gains.</p> <p>Our estimates imply that moving a child out of public housing to a low-poverty area when young (at age 8 on average) using a subsidized voucher like the MTO experimental voucher will increase the child’s total lifetime earnings by about $302,000. This is equivalent to a gain of $99,000 per child moved in present value at age 8, discounting future earnings at a 3% interest rate. The additional tax revenue generated from these earnings increases would itself offset the incremental cost of the subsidized voucher relative to providing public housing.</p> <p>We conclude that offering low-income families housing vouchers and assistance in moving to lowerpoverty neighborhoods has substantial benefits for the families themselves and for taxpayers. It appears important to target such housing vouchers to families with young children – perhaps even at birth – to maximize the benefits. Our results provide less support for policies that seek to improve the economic outcomes of adults through residential relocation. More broadly, our findings suggest that efforts to integrate disadvantaged families into mixed-income communities are likely to reduce the persistence of poverty across generations.</p> <p><em>The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Internal Revenue Service or the U.S. Treasury Department. This work is a component of a larger project examining the effects of tax expenditures on the budget deficit and economic activity. All results based on tax data in this paper are constructed using statistics originally reported in the SOI Working Paper “The Economic Impacts of Tax Expenditures: Evidence from Spatial Variation across the U.S.,” approved under IRS contract TIRNO-12-P-00374 and presented at the Office of Tax Analysis on November 3, 2014. MTO participant data are highly confidential. HUD allowed the authors special access to the experimental data under Data License DL14MA001, approved March 28, 2014.</em></p>

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R01AG031259

  NIH · $1.9M · 2017

• NIH Grant R01HD040404

  NIH · $3.9M · 2013

Frequent coauthors

• Claudia Goldin

  Harvard University

  218 shared

• Jeffrey R. Kling

  87 shared

• David Autor

  85 shared

• Alan B. Krueger

  Agricultural Research Service

  63 shared

• Jens Ludwig

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  57 shared

• David Dorn

  45 shared

• Jeffrey B. Liebman

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  37 shared

• Lisa Sanbonmatsu

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  36 shared

Labs

• Lawrence KatzPI

Education

• Ph.D., Economics

  Harvard University

  1985

• B.A., Economics

  Yale University

  1980

Awards & honors

• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Scien…
• Fellow of the Econometric Society
• Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists