In November 2019, Ekaterina Khmelnitskaya and Miguel Mascarua presented their research at the annual conference organized by the Southern Economic Association in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. This large three-day conference included presentations by a diverse set of scholars from universities and government research organizations from all across the United States, including the top universities like Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, etc. Ekaterina presented her paper “Competition and Innovation in the Pharmaceutical Industry” that studies how competition between novel drugs that have not yet entered the market affects the rate of innovation in the industry. She also discussed a paper presented by a researcher at the Federal Trade Commission. Both papers were part of the panel on Industrial Organization and Health. Miguel presented two papers during the sessions. The first one was his job market paper “Weak laws, informality, and organized crime: An establishment-level approach” that quantifies the costs of weak institutions on aggregate output. Also, he presented a work-in-progress titled “A whiter shade of wealth: Skin color discrimination and the distribution of wealth.” Both sessions were productive since he received excellent feedback that will improve the quality of his work.