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The new geography of jobs and how they determine salaries.
World-renowned scholar in labor economics and urban economics- Lecture Info
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What Makes a City Successful
The landscape of the global economy is changing. Old powers that ascended with the manufacturing boom are giving way to new ones. For the last 50 years, the global economy has shifted from traditional manufacturing to knowledge, ideas, and innovation, following the inexorable march of the times. Cities that succeeded in transforming themselves structurally rose to prominence, becoming “stars.” How did these “star cities” come to have such an abundance of jobs with high salaries and expensive housing? These cities have a high concentration of IT companies and human resources because of their gravitational pull. Moretti reveals why companies aggregate at high-tech industrial clusters, despite the high rent and salary, and how these industrial clusters form. He also offers his outlook on how the urban economy will change after the COVID-19 pandemic. Moretti shows through data how the "work-from-home" trend will not be able to spread any further and rebuts the “end of cities” theory, which posits that with more employees working from home, people will leave the declining big cities for cheaper options.
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Enrico Moretti
Professor of economics at U.C. Berkeley Author of the bestselling book, The New Geography of Jobs Former editor-in-chief of the Journal of Economic Perspectives
Enrico Moretti is an Italian-born American economist and a professor of economics at UC Berkeley. In the last 25 years, Moretti analyzed the jobs and income trends of major cities, shedding light on the new geography of jobs and how it determines income. His book, The New Geography of Jobs, was lauded by President Obama, who referenced it while designing his future economic policy. It also was called “the most important book of the decade on the contemporary economy” by The Wall Street Journal. Moretti is hailed as a master of empirical studies by scholars of international renown, such as Matthew Kahn and Edward Glaeser.
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