JOB MARKET PAPER
Home Production in the City
Funding: Hub for Equal Representation, STICERD, STEG
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 incentiving specialization within the household, and thus potentially halving labor force participation. Using origin-destination travel data from the mega city of Sao 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 productivity, 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 had the same access to private cars as men, labor force participation would increase by 11.5 percentage points—an effect larger than equalizing labor market returns by gender—with especially strong impacts for married women on the urban periphery. This shows that investing in transportation infrastructure that makes commuting equal by gender would draw many women into the labor market, potentially halving the gender gap in labor supply.
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.
WORKS 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 Brazil
with Gharad Bryan, Flavia Leite and Nick Tsivanidis.
BOOK CHAPTER
with Daniel A. C. Barbosa, Thiemo Fetzer and Pedro C. L. Souza. Cambrige University Press, 2024.