Enrico Moretti
Biographic Data
| ID | 3822387 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Enrico Moretti |
| GIVEN NAMES | Enrico |
| FAMILY NAME | Moretti |
| SIGNATURE | MORETTI E |
| AFFILIATIONS | National Bureau of Economic Research |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5124-9741 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 127 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Recasting Il Metodo: Maria Montessori and Early Childhood Education in Italy (1909-1926)
Maria Montessori’s Il Metodo della Pedagogia Scientifica was published at the end of the 1910s. The text enjoyed great success after its publication, both in Italy and abroad. Over the course of the following decades, this work underwent numerous changes: various editions were published and numerous translations made, while the author herself added many sections and deleted others from the original draft. In this essay, I examine the first three …
The Intellectual Spoils of War? Defense R&D, Productivity, and International Spillovers
We examine the impact of government funding for R&D—and defense-related R&D in particular—on privately conducted R&D and its ultimate effect on productivity growth. We estimate longitudinal models that relate privately funded R&D to lagged government-funded R&D using industry-country level data from OECD countries and firm level data from France. To deal with the potentially endogenous allocation of government R&D funds, we use changes in predict…
Family Ties: Vatican Humanitarianism and Family Reunification at the End of Empire
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…
Estimating Who Benefits from Productivity Growth: Local and Distant Effects of City Productivity Growth on Wages, Rents, and Inequality
We first estimate the direct effects on local workers’ earnings and housing costs from increases in local labor demand caused by gains in city-level manufacturing productivity. We find that local workers benefit from productivity growth, even after subtracting increases in housing costs. These gains are larger for local less educated workers, such that productivity growth reduces local inequality. We then propose and implement a new transparent m…
Where is Standard of Living the Highest? Local Prices and the Geography of Consumption
Income differences across US cities are well documented, but little is known about the level of standard of living in each city—defined as the amount of market-based consumption that residents are able to afford. In this paper we provide estimates of the standard of living by commuting zone for households in a given income or education group, and we study how they relate to local cost of living. Using a novel dataset, we observe debit and credit …
Where is Standard of Living the Highest? Local Prices and the Geography of Consumption
Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation
We quantify the amount of spatial misallocation of labor across US cities and its aggregate costs. Misallocation arises because high productivity cities like New York and the San Francisco Bay Area have adopted stringent restrictions to new housing supply, effectively limiting the number of workers who have access to such high productivity. Using a spatial equilibrium model and data from 220 metropolitan areas we find that these constraints lower…
Who Benefits From Productivity Growth? Direct and Indirect Effects of Local TFP Growth on Wages, Rents, and Inequality
We estimate direct and indirect effects of total factor productivity growth in manufacturing on US workers' earnings, housing costs, and purchasing power. Drawing on four alternative instrumental variables, we consistently find that when a city experiences productivity gains in manufacturing, there are substantial local increases in employment and average earnings. For renters, increased earnings are largely offset by increased cost of living; fo…
Do You Use JEP Articles in Your Classroom? One More Chance to Share
Using JEP Articles as Course Readings? Tell Us About It
Quota zero. Messina dopo il terremoto: La ricostruzione infinita
Quota zero. Messina dopo il terremoto: la ricostruzione infinita." Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 22(5), pp. 651–652
Estimating and Testing Models with Many Treatment Levels and Limited Instruments
Empirical researchers interested in the causal effect of the endogenous regressor often use instrumental variables. When few valid instruments are available, they typically estimate restricted specifications that impose uniform per unit treatment effects, even when these effects are likely to vary. We show that in these cases, ordinary least squares and instrumental variables estimators identify different weighted averages of all per unit effects…
Local Economic Development, Agglomeration Economies, and the Big Push: 100 Years of Evidence from the Tennessee Valley Authority
We study the long-run effects of one of the most ambitious regional development programs in U.S. history: the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Using as controls authorities that were proposed but never approved by Congress, we find that the TVA led to large gains in agricultural employment that were eventually reversed when the program’s subsidies ended. Gains in manufacturing employment, by contrast, continued to intensify well after federal tr…
People, Places, and Public Policy: Some Simple Welfare Economics of Local Economic Development Programs
Most countries exhibit large and persistent geographical differences in wages, income, and unemployment rates. A growing class of place-based policies attempts to address these differences through public investments and subsidies that target disadvantaged neighborhoods, cities, or regions. Place-based policies have the potential to profoundly affect the location of economic activity, along with the wages, employment, and industry mix of communiti…
State incentives for innovation, star scientists and jobs: Evidence from biotech
Real Wage Inequality
While nominal wage differences between skilled and unskilled workers have increased since 1980, college graduates have experienced larger increases in cost of living because they have increasingly concentrated in cities with high cost of housing. Using a city-specific CPI, I find that real wage differences between college and high school graduates have grown significantly less than nominal differences. Changes in the geographical location of diff…
Inequality at Work: The Effect of Peer Salaries on Job Satisfaction
We study the effect of disclosing information on peers' salaries on workers' job satisfaction and job search intentions. A randomly chosen subset of University of California employees was informed about a new website listing the pay of University employees. All employees were then surveyed about their job satisfaction and job search intentions. Workers with salaries below the median for their pay unit and occupation report lower pay and job satis…
Local Multipliers
The Political Economy of Intergenerational Income Mobility
Identifying Agglomeration Spillovers: Evidence from Winners and Losers of Large Plant Openings
We quantify agglomeration spillovers by comparing changes in total factor productivity (TFP) among incumbent plants in "winning" counties that attracted a large manufacturing plant and "losing" counties that were the new plant's runner-up choice. Winning and losing counties have similar trends in TFP prior to the new plant opening. Five years after the opening, incumbent plants' TFP is 12 percent higher in winning counties. This productivity spil…
Peers at Work
We study peer effects in the workplace. Specifically, we investigate whether, how, and why the productivity of a worker depends on the productivity of coworkers in the same team. Using high-frequency data on worker productivity from a large supermarket chain, we find strong evidence of positive productivity spillovers from the introduction of highly productive personnel into a shift. Worker effort is positively related to the productivity of work…
Extreme Weather Events, Mortality, and Migration
We estimate the effect of extreme weather on life expectancy in the United States. Using high-frequency data, we find that both extreme heat and cold result in immediate increases in mortality. The increase in mortality following extreme heat appears mostly driven by near-term displacement, while the increase in mortality following extreme cold is long lasting. We estimate that the number of annual deaths attributable to cold temperature is 0.8% …
The Demand for Sons
Do parents have preferences over the gender of their children, and if so, does this have negative consequences for daughters versus sons? In this paper, we show that child gender affects the marital status, family structure, and fertility of a significant number of American families. Overall, a first-born daughter is significantly less likely to be living with her father compared to a first-born son. Three factors are important in explaining this…
Biology as Destiny? Short‐ and Long‐Run Determinants of Intergenerational Transmission of Birth Weight
Little is known about the mechanisms underlying the transfer of economic status between generations. This paper addresses the question of whether inter-generational correlations in health contribute to the perpetuation of economic status. We examine inter-generational correlations in birth weight, a key indicator of the health of newborns that we link to future educational attainment and earnings using a unique data set based on California births…
Does Voting Technology Affect Election Outcomes? Touch-screen Voting and the 2004 Presidential Election
Critics argue that electronic voting is vulnerable to fraud. We test whether voting technology affected electoral outcomes in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. We find a positive correlation between use of electronic voting and George Bush vote share. The effect could have been large enough to influence the final results in some swing states. While this pattern would appear to be consistent with allegations of voting irregularities, a clo…
Identifying Agglomeration Spillovers: Evidence from Winners and Losers of Large Plant Openings
We quantify agglomeration spillovers by comparing changes in total factor productivity (TFP) among incumbent plants in "winning" counties that attracted a large manufacturing plant and "losing" counties that were the new plant's runner-up choice. Winning and losing counties have similar trends in TFP prior to the new plant opening. Five years after the opening, incumbent plants' TFP is 12 percent higher in winning counties. This productivity spil…
Can Free Entry Be Inefficient? Fixed Commissions and Social Waste in the Real Estate Industry
Real estate agents typically charge a 6 percent commission, regardless of the price of the house sold. As a consequence, the commission fee from selling a house will differ dramatically across cities depending on the average price of housing, although the effort necessary to match buyers and sellers may not be that different. We use a simple economic model to show that if barriers to entry are low, the entry of real estate agents in cities with h…
Social Networks and Migrations: Italy 1876-1913
State incentives for innovation, star scientists and jobs: Evidence from biotech
Social Networks and Migrations: Italy 1876–1913
The standard neoclassical economic model of migration introduced by Todaro predicts 1) that migration occurs when the expected net present value of earnings from migrating, weighted by the probability of employment in the destination country, is positive; and 2) that migrants choose as their destination country the one with the largest wage premium net of transportation costs. The pattern of Italian migration to the Americas does not conform to t…
Social Networks and Migrations: Italy 1876–1913
The standard neoclassical economic model of migration introduced by Todaro predicts 1) that migration occurs when the expected net present value of earnings from migrating, weighted by the probability of employment in the destination country, is positive; and 2) that migrants choose as their destination country the one with the largest wage premium net of transportation costs. The pattern of Italian migration to the Americas does not conform to t…
Social Networks and Migrations: Italy 1876-1913
The Effect of Education on Crime: Evidence from Prison Inmates, Arrests, and Self-Reports
We estimate the effect of high school graduation on participation in criminal activity accounting for endogeneity of schooling. We begin by analyzing the effect of high school graduation on incarceration using Census data. Instrumental variable estimates using changes in state compulsory attendance laws as an instrument for high school graduation uncover a significant reduction in incarceration for both blacks and whites. When estimating the impa…
Mother's Education and the Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital: Evidence from College Openings
We examine the effect of maternal education on birth outcomes using Vital Statistics Natality data for 1970 to 1999. We also assess the importance of four channels through which maternal education may improve birth outcomes: use of prenatal care, smoking, marriage, and fertility. In an effort to account for the endogeneity of educational attainment, we use data about the availability of colleges in the woman's county in her seventeenth year as an…
Can Free Entry Be Inefficient? Fixed Commissions and Social Waste in the Real Estate Industry
Real estate agents typically charge a 6 percent commission, regardless of the price of the house sold. As a consequence, the commission fee from selling a house will differ dramatically across cities depending on the average price of housing, although the effort necessary to match buyers and sellers may not be that different. We use a simple economic model to show that if barriers to entry are low, the entry of real estate agents in cities with h…
Do Voters Affect or Elect Policies? Evidence from the U. S. House
There are two fundamentally different views of the role of elections in policy formation. In one view, voters can affect candidates' policy choices: competition for votes induces politicians to move toward the center. In this view, elections have the effect of bringing about some degree of policy compromise. In the alternative view, voters merely elect policies: politicians cannot make credible promises to moderate their policies, and elections a…
Chapter 51 Human capital externalities in cities
Does education improve citizenship? Evidence from the United States and the United Kingdom
Estimating the social return to higher education: Evidence from longitudinal and repeated cross-sectional data
Workers' Education, Spillovers, and Productivity: Evidence from Plant-Level Production Functions
I assess the magnitude of human capital spillovers by estimating production functions using a unique firm-worker matched data set. Productivity of plants in cities that experience large increases in the share of college graduates rises more than the productivity of similar plants in cities that experience small increases in the share of college graduates. These productivity gains are offset by increased labor costs. Using three alternative measur…
Biology as Destiny? Short‐ and Long‐Run Determinants of Intergenerational Transmission of Birth Weight
Little is known about the mechanisms underlying the transfer of economic status between generations. This paper addresses the question of whether inter-generational correlations in health contribute to the perpetuation of economic status. We examine inter-generational correlations in birth weight, a key indicator of the health of newborns that we link to future educational attainment and earnings using a unique data set based on California births…
Does Voting Technology Affect Election Outcomes? Touch-screen Voting and the 2004 Presidential Election
Critics argue that electronic voting is vulnerable to fraud. We test whether voting technology affected electoral outcomes in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. We find a positive correlation between use of electronic voting and George Bush vote share. The effect could have been large enough to influence the final results in some swing states. While this pattern would appear to be consistent with allegations of voting irregularities, a clo…
Does Managed Care Hurt Health? Evidence from Medicaid Mothers
Most Americans are now in some form of managed care plan that restricts access to services in order to reduce costs. It is difficult to determine whether these restrictions affect health because individuals and firms self-select into managed care. We investigate the effect of managed care using a California law that required some pregnant women on Medicaid to enter managed care. We use a unique longitudinal database of California births in which …
The Demand for Sons
Do parents have preferences over the gender of their children, and if so, does this have negative consequences for daughters versus sons? In this paper, we show that child gender affects the marital status, family structure, and fertility of a significant number of American families. Overall, a first-born daughter is significantly less likely to be living with her father compared to a first-born son. Three factors are important in explaining this…
Peers at Work
We study peer effects in the workplace. Specifically, we investigate whether, how, and why the productivity of a worker depends on the productivity of coworkers in the same team. Using high-frequency data on worker productivity from a large supermarket chain, we find strong evidence of positive productivity spillovers from the introduction of highly productive personnel into a shift. Worker effort is positively related to the productivity of work…
Extreme Weather Events, Mortality, and Migration
We estimate the effect of extreme weather on life expectancy in the United States. Using high-frequency data, we find that both extreme heat and cold result in immediate increases in mortality. The increase in mortality following extreme heat appears mostly driven by near-term displacement, while the increase in mortality following extreme cold is long lasting. We estimate that the number of annual deaths attributable to cold temperature is 0.8% …
Local Multipliers
The Political Economy of Intergenerational Income Mobility
Identifying Agglomeration Spillovers: Evidence from Winners and Losers of Large Plant Openings
We quantify agglomeration spillovers by comparing changes in total factor productivity (TFP) among incumbent plants in "winning" counties that attracted a large manufacturing plant and "losing" counties that were the new plant's runner-up choice. Winning and losing counties have similar trends in TFP prior to the new plant opening. Five years after the opening, incumbent plants' TFP is 12 percent higher in winning counties. This productivity spil…
Inequality at Work: The Effect of Peer Salaries on Job Satisfaction
We study the effect of disclosing information on peers' salaries on workers' job satisfaction and job search intentions. A randomly chosen subset of University of California employees was informed about a new website listing the pay of University employees. All employees were then surveyed about their job satisfaction and job search intentions. Workers with salaries below the median for their pay unit and occupation report lower pay and job satis…
Real Wage Inequality
While nominal wage differences between skilled and unskilled workers have increased since 1980, college graduates have experienced larger increases in cost of living because they have increasingly concentrated in cities with high cost of housing. Using a city-specific CPI, I find that real wage differences between college and high school graduates have grown significantly less than nominal differences. Changes in the geographical location of diff…
Local Economic Development, Agglomeration Economies, and the Big Push: 100 Years of Evidence from the Tennessee Valley Authority
We study the long-run effects of one of the most ambitious regional development programs in U.S. history: the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Using as controls authorities that were proposed but never approved by Congress, we find that the TVA led to large gains in agricultural employment that were eventually reversed when the program’s subsidies ended. Gains in manufacturing employment, by contrast, continued to intensify well after federal tr…
People, Places, and Public Policy: Some Simple Welfare Economics of Local Economic Development Programs
Most countries exhibit large and persistent geographical differences in wages, income, and unemployment rates. A growing class of place-based policies attempts to address these differences through public investments and subsidies that target disadvantaged neighborhoods, cities, or regions. Place-based policies have the potential to profoundly affect the location of economic activity, along with the wages, employment, and industry mix of communiti…
State incentives for innovation, star scientists and jobs: Evidence from biotech
Estimating and Testing Models with Many Treatment Levels and Limited Instruments
Empirical researchers interested in the causal effect of the endogenous regressor often use instrumental variables. When few valid instruments are available, they typically estimate restricted specifications that impose uniform per unit treatment effects, even when these effects are likely to vary. We show that in these cases, ordinary least squares and instrumental variables estimators identify different weighted averages of all per unit effects…
Economics (29 works) · Labour economics (14 works) · Economic growth (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Productivity (10 works) · Regional Economics and Spatial Analysis (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Demographic economics (9 works) · Fiscal Policy and Economic Growth (8 works) · Macroeconomics (7 works)