About

Enrico Moretti is the Michael Peevey and Donald Vial Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. His research covers the fields of labor economics and urban economics, with a focus on the economics of cities and regions. He serves as the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Economic Perspectives and is a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Additionally, he is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London, and affiliated with the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn. Professor Moretti has received several awards and honors, including the Society of Labor Economists’ Rosen Prize, the Carlo Alberto Medal, the IZA Young Labor Economist Award, and a Fulbright Fellowship. His book, “The New Geography of Jobs,” has been translated into seven languages and was awarded the William Bowen Prize for significant contributions to understanding public policy and the labor market.

Research topics

• Labour economics
• Economics
• Microeconomics
• Macroeconomics
• Geography
• Industrial organization
• Economic geography
• Mathematics
• Demographic economics
• Agricultural economics
• Economic growth

Selected publications

• Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone? Changes in the Geography of Work in the US, 1980-2021

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-03-01

  reportOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone? Changes in the Geography of Work in the U.S., 1980-2021

  2025-05-09

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  We examine changes in the spatial distribution of good jobs across U.S. commuting zones over 1980-2000 and 2000-2021. We define good jobs as those in industries in which full-time workers attain high wages, accounting for individual and regional characteristics. The share of good jobs in manufacturing has plummeted; for college graduates, good jobs have shifted to (mostly tradable) business, professional, and IT services, while for those without a BA they have shifted to (nontradable) construction. There is strong persistence in where good jobs are located. Over the last four decades, places with larger concentrations of good job industries have tended to hold onto them, consistent with a model of proportional growth. Turning to regional specialization in good job industries, we find evidence of mean reversion. Commuting zones with larger initial concentrations of good jobs have thus seen even faster growth in lower-wage (and mostly nontradable) services. Changing regional employment patterns are most pronounced among racial minorities and the foreign-born, who are relatively concentrated in fast growing cities of the South and West. Therefore, good job regions today look vastly different than in 1980: they are more centered around human-capital-intensive tradable services, are surrounded by larger concentrations of low-wage, non-tradable industries, and are more demographically diverse. (Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality Working Paper)

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone? Changes in the Geography of Work in the Us, 1980-2021

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Family Ties: Vatican Humanitarianism and Family Reunification at the End of Empire

  Contemporary European History · 2024-11-13

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This essay analyses the Holy See's engagement in the postwar discourse surrounding displaced minors by focusing on the case of displaced Italian children from Libya. Separated from their families and evacuated to Italy at the onset of the Second World War, they were placed in Italian Youth of the Lictor (Gioventù Italiana del Littorio; GIL) camps. In the aftermath of the war, these displaced children petitioned to return to their families who had remained in territories no longer part of the Italian empire. This article shows how the Papal Aid Committee for Assisting Refugees took part in the relocation efforts and contributed to the conversation on family reunification. By navigating postwar aid and forming unexpected alliances, the Holy See not only contributed to reshaping Italy's geopolitical presence in the Mediterranean but also solidified conservative family norms within the international discussion on humanitarianism.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Size Matters: Matching Externalities and the Advantages of Large Labor Markets

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-03-01 · 2 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Economists have long hypothesized that large and thick labor markets facilitate the matching between workers and firms.We use administrative data from the LEHD to compare the job search outcomes of workers originally in large and small markets who lost their jobs due to a firm closure.We define a labor market as the Commuting Zone×industry pair in the quarter before the closure.To account for the possible sorting of high-quality workers into larger markets, the effect of market size is identified by comparing workers in large and small markets within the same CZ, conditional on workers fixed effects.In the six quarters before their firm's closure, workers in small and large markets have a similar probability of employment and quarterly earnings.Following the closure, workers in larger markets experience significantly shorter nonemployment spells and smaller earning losses than workers in smaller markets, indicating that larger markets partially insure workers against idiosyncratic employment shocks.A 1 percent increase in market size results in a 0.014 and 0.023 percentage points increase in the 1-year reemployment probability of high school and college graduates, respectively.Displaced workers in larger markets also experience a significantly lower need for relocation to a different CZ.Conditional on finding a new job, the quality of the new worker-firm match is higher in larger markets, as proxied by a higher probability that the new match lasts more than one year; the new industry is the same as the old one; and the new industry is a "good fit" for the worker's college major.Consistent with the notion that market size should be particularly consequential for more specialized workers, we find that the effects are larger in industries where human capital is more specialized and less portable.Our findings may help explain the geographical agglomeration of industries-especially those that make intensive use of highly specialized workers-and validate one of the mechanisms that urban economists have proposed for the existence of agglomeration economies.

  PublisherDOI

• Size Matters: Matching Externalities and the Advantages of Large Labor Markets

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Gentrification, Mobility, and Consumption

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-07-09 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access

  We study the effect of localized housing price hikes on renters' mobility, consumption, and credit outcomes. Consistent with a spatial equilibrium model, we find that the consumption responses vary greatly for movers and stayers. While movers increase their consumption, purchase homes, and cars, stayers are relatively unaffected.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Place-Based Productivity and Costs in Science

  Entrepreneurship and Innovation Policy and the Economy · 2023-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleSenior author

  Cities with a larger concentration of scientists have been shown to be more productive places for additional scientists to do research and development (R&D). At the same time, these urban areas tend to be associated with higher costs of doing research, in terms of both wages and land. Although the literature on the benefits of agglomeration economies is extensive, it offers no direct evidence of how productivity gains from agglomeration compare with higher costs of production. This paper aims to shed light on the balance between local productivity and local costs in science. Using a novel data set, we estimate place-based costs of carrying out R&D in each US metro area and assess how these place-based costs vary with the density of scientists in each area. We then compare these costs with estimates of the corresponding productivity benefits of more scientist density from Moretti (2021). Adding more scientists to a city increases both productivity and production costs, but the rise in productivity is larger than the rise in production costs. In particular, each 10% rise in the stock of scientists is associated with a 0.11% rise in costs and a 0.67% rise in productivity. This implies that firms moving from cities with a small agglomeration of scientists to cities with a large agglomeration of scientists experience productivity gains that are six times larger than the increase in production costs. This finding is consistent with the increased concentration of R&D activity observed over the past 30 years. However, although the productivity estimate has only modest nonlinearities, the cost estimates suggest much larger nonlinearities as the concentration of scientists increases. For the most concentrated R&D cities, the difference between productivity gains and cost increases is close to zero.

  PublisherDOI

• The World's Rust Belts: The Heterogeneous Effects of Deindustrialization on 1,993 Cities in Six Countries

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• The World's Rust Belts: The Heterogeneous Effects of Deindustrialization on 1,993 Cities in Six Countries

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Janet Currie

  Princeton University

  62 shared

• Susanna Stillavato

  University of Milan

  49 shared

• Giuditta Carretti

  University of Florence

  49 shared

• Andrea Monte

  University of Verona

  49 shared

• Fabrizio Esposito

  49 shared

• Mirko Manetti

  University of Florence

  49 shared

• Claudia Cerulli

  Foro Italico University of Rome

  49 shared

• Paola Zamparo

  University of Verona

  49 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Economics

  University of California, Berkeley

  1999

• M.A., Economics

  University of California, Berkeley

  1996

• B.A., Economics

  University of Rome 'La Sapienza'

  1992

Awards & honors

• Society of Labor Economists’ Rosen Prize for outstanding con…
• Carlo Alberto Medal
• IZA Young Labor Economist Award
• Fulbright Fellowship
• William Bowen Prize for the most important contribution towa…