Job Market Paper
Job Market Paper
Home Production in the City
By 2050, two thirds of the world's population is predicted to live in cities, predominantly mega-cities. Agglomeration drives up productivity, but the commuting costs may act as a brake by incentivizing specialization within the household, and thus potentially decreasing female labor force participation. Using origin-destination travel data from the mega city of São Paulo in Brazil, I document that labor force participation declines sharply with distance from the city center, a spatial gradient largely driven by married women. When women work, they not only face lower wages, but also commute in slower modes of transport, relying more often on public transport and less on driving than men. To quantify the implications of these patterns for the economy, I model the trade-off between benefits of agglomeration and the cost of commuting using a quantitative spatial framework in which couples and singles decide where to live and whether and where to work. My model reveals that if women faced the same commuting costs as men, labor force participation would increase by 10.3 percentage points –an effect larger than equalizing labor market returns by gender–with especially strong impacts for married women on the urban periphery. Investing in transportation infrastructure that makes commuting equal by gender could have large aggregate and welfare implications.
Publication
Monitoring Technology: The Impact of Body-Worn Cameras on Citizen-Police Interactions with Daniel A. C. Barbosa, Pedro C. L. Souza and Thiemo Fetzer.
The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2025.
Media: BBC Brasil, Fantastico, O Globo, Folha de SP, Probable Causation
We provide experimental evidence that using body-worn cameras (BWCs) for police monitoring improves police-citizen interactions. In an intervention carried in Brazil in 2018, we find that treated dispatches show a 61.2% decrease in police use of force and a 47.0% reduction in adverse interactions, including handcuff use and arrests. The use of body-worn cameras also improve the quality of officers’ record from the dispatches. The rate of incomplete reports dropped by 5.9%, which is accompanied by a 69% increase in the notification of domestic violence. We explore various mechanisms that explain why BWCs work and show that the results are consistent with the police changing their behavior in the presence of cameras. Overall, results show that the use of body-worn cameras de-escalates conflicts.
Research in Progress
The Geography of Life: Evidence from Copenhagen with Gabriel Ahlfeldt, Ismir Mulalic and Daniel Sturm.
We use newly constructed individual-level panel data for Denmark covering more than 30 years to document and understand the origins and consequences of spatial sorting by age and family status within cities. Based on by reduced-form evidence that disentangles sorting by age and family status from correlated individual effects, we develop a quantitative urban model with heterogeneity by skill, age, and family status. We use the quantified model to show that the main mechanism driving spatial sorting is heterogeneity in preferences for local amenities. Finally, we use the estimated model to explore the effect of demographic change — population aging, falling fertility, and increasing singlehood — on cities and find that their combined effect on cities will be substantially more muted than any of these changes on their own.
Land Value Capture and Air Rights: Evidence from São Paulo with Gharad Bryan, Flavia Leite and Nick Tsivanidis.
Cities across the developing world struggle to finance infrastructure and manage rapid urban growth. Land value capture (LVC) offers a promising solution, allowing governments to recover part of the land value increases generated by public action and reinvest them in urban improvements. São Paulo provides a unique setting to study the effects and the efficiency of LVC, having implemented two distinct instruments that differ in design, scope, and redistributive capacity. We assemble a novel dataset tracking every real-estate development in the city since 2000—from land acquisition to unit sales—combining administrative records, survey data, and information on the use of air rights. Using this rich dataset, we analyze how LVC instruments shape developers’ behavior, market structure, and the incidence of land-use regulation, shedding light on the efficiency and equity implications of capturing land value as a tool for financing urban infrastructure.
Book Chapter
Can Trust Be Built through Citizen Monitoring of Police Activity? Evidence from Santa Catarina, Brazil with Daniel A. C. Barbosa, Pedro C. L. Souza and Thiemo Fetzer. Cambrige University Press, 2024.
This chapter studies the effect of Rede de Vizinhos (RdV or “Neighbor Network”) community policing program in Santa Catarina, Brazil, which aims to improve public safety and trust between citizens and police by facilitating real time information about crime and public safety through dedicated WhatsApp instant messages groups with the participation of a police officer. We randomly allocated neighborhoods that would see the policy implemented into treatment and control groups, with the former being exposed to an information campaign through which we publicized induction meetings using Facebook. Despite reaching roughly 10 percent of Santa Catarina’s population, our study does not find a differential participation rate in the RdV campaign regions. Further, we don’t find evidence of increased perceptions over the police or improvements over criminal rates in treated neighborhoods. Our results suggest that despite their promise, (technology-enabled) community policing programs may fail to deliver substantial impacts given saturation dynamics and diminishing marginal returns – our baseline surveys indicated that 52 percent of respondents had heard already about the RdV program with 13.1 percent actively participating.