career has been broad and prolific, touching most areas of labor economics. Enrico’s early work deepened our understanding of human capital externalities, leading organically to three areas of his research, that of agglomeration economies, peer effects, and place-based policies. Alongside his groundbreaking work on externalities, Enrico Moretti has also written papers in diverse topics such as party vs voter preference in determining the roll-call votes of elected representatives, the intergenerational transmission of human capital, the impact of compulsory education on political participation and crime, the consequences of pollution for health, the role of children’s gender in household formation, among many other topics. He has received several awards including the Carlos Alberto Award, the prestigious Rosen Prize from the Society of Labor Economists as well as the William Bowen Prize for his book “The Geography of New Jobs”.

Together with Enrico Moretti’s fascinating keynote lecture on the role of city size in determining labor market outcomes, the conference was composed of a fantastic line up of speakers. In the first day, Fernand Rojas Ampuero (Center for International Affairs, Harvard University) discussed and presented the long run negative effects on children of displacing lower income families from slums into social housing. Her research showed how these displacements led to worse outcomes such as education and employment that persisted well into adult life of the children. In the same day, Heather Sarsons (Vancouver School of Economics, UBC) analyzed how taking into account consumer preferences for fairness in goods production can reconcile different contradictory findings of the effect of minimum wages on labor markets. In the second day, we were pleased to have Winne van Dijk (Yale University) who highlighted how a right to counsel law for tenants in New York led to unintended large increases in rents. Also in the second day, Lorenzo Lagos (Brown University) analyzed the important question of making the workplace more gender balanced with better amenities such as childcare facilities. His findings point to the important role of unions in achieving these goals.

The conference was finished by an exquisite lunch prepared by the staff at ITHQ.