Enrico Moretti

Enrico Moretti is an economist and the Michael R. Peevey and Donald Vial Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA). His research focuses primarily on labor economics and urban economics, including the effects of education, innovation, and the geographic concentration of economic activity.

Education and academic career Moretti received a Laurea in economics from Bocconi University in Milan in 1993 and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2000. He was an assistant professor of economics at the University of California, Los Angeles from 2000 to 2004 before joining the Berkeley faculty in 2004 as an associate professor with tenure.

Moretti has also been a research affiliate of the International Growth Centre.

In a 2019 paper with Chang-Tai Hsieh, Moretti studied the effects of restrictions on housing supply in high-productivity U.S. cities. Using data from 220 metropolitan areas and a spatial equilibrium model, the authors estimated that housing constraints reduced aggregate U.S. economic growth by 36 percent between 1964 and 2009.

Moretti has also studied the relationship between geographic concentration and innovation. In a 2021 article in the American Economic Review, he used longitudinal data on U.S. inventors to examine the effects of high-tech clusters on inventor productivity. He found that inventors who moved to cities with larger clusters of inventors in the same field subsequently produced more and higher-quality patents.

With Patrick Kline, Moretti examined the long-term effects of the Tennessee Valley Authority as a regional development program. Their 2014 study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics found that gains in agricultural employment were eventually reversed after subsidies ended, whereas gains in manufacturing employment continued after federal transfers had ceased. The authors interpreted the persistence of manufacturing gains as consistent with agglomeration economies.

His research has also examined education and human-capital externalities, including the social returns to higher education and the relationship between education, productivity, and criminal activity. In 2008, he received the Carlo Alberto Medal, which is awarded to an Italian economist under the age of 40 for outstanding research contributions in economics.

In 2014, Moretti was elected a Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists and received the Society's Sherwin Rosen Prize for outstanding contributions in the field of labor economics.

In 2015, he received the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics Best Paper Award for his article "Real Wage Inequality". In 2016, he was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society. He was elected a Fellow of the European Association of Labour Economists in 2019.

The New Geography of Jobs In 2012, Moretti published The New Geography of Jobs, a book about the geographic distribution of employment, innovation, and economic opportunity in the United States. The book examines differences among U.S. communities and the relationship between innovation, human capital, and local economic development.

The book received the William G. Bowen Prize from the Industrial Relations Section of Princeton University in 2013.

Selected bibliography

Greenstone, Michael; Hornbeck, Richard; Moretti, Enrico (2010). "Identifying Agglomeration Spillovers: Evidence from Winners and Losers of Large Plant Openings". Journal of Political Economy. 118 (3): 536–598. Moretti, Enrico (2011). "Local Labor Markets". In Ashenfelter, Orley; Card, David (eds.). Handbook of Labor Economics. Elsevier. Moretti, Enrico (2013). "Real Wage Inequality". American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. 5 (1): 65–103. Kline, Patrick; Moretti, Enrico (2014). "Local Economic Development, Agglomeration Economies, and the Big Push: 100 Years of Evidence from the Tennessee Valley Authority". Quarterly Journal of Economics. 129 (1): 275–331. Moretti, Enrico; Wilson, Daniel J. (2017). "The Effect of State Taxes on the Geographical Location of Top Earners: Evidence from Star Scientists". American Economic Review. 107 (7): 1858–1903. Hsieh, Chang-Tai; Moretti, Enrico (2019). "Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation". American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics. 11 (2): 1–39. Moretti, Enrico (2021). "The Effect of High-Tech Clusters on the Productivity of Top Inventors". American Economic Review. 111 (10): 3328–3375.