Working Papers
Working Papers
Delayed Childbearing and Urban Revival: A Structural Approach (with Clara Santamaría) December 2025: new draft, submitted
Neighborhood amenities cater to the local presence of children, creating a two-way causal relationship between urban structure and aggregate fertility. In this paper, we build a dynamic spatial model with endogenous fertility to study the link between urban revival and delayed childbearing. The estimation exploits variation in access to infertility treatments to identify the response of amenities to the share of childless households. Delayed childbearing accounts for 7.5% of observed urban revival directly, and up to 60% when housing prices and amenities adjust. Moreover, modeling fertility choices allows us to examine how urban change contributed to the fertility decline.
Mums and the City: Household Labour Supply and Location Choice December 2025: new draft, submitted
Best Student Paper Honourable Mention, 2020 Urban Economics Association Virtual Meeting
This paper examines the interaction between city choice and household labor supply decisions. Using U.S. data, I document a new fact: labor force participation increases with city size for all demographic groups except for married women with children, for whom it decreases. To rationalize these patterns, I embed a two-member household with endogenous labor supply into a spatial equilibrium framework. In the model, longer commuting times, long-hours occupations, and higher childcare costs in large cities increase the gains from intra-household specialization, discouraging mothers' participation. Endogenous sorting on work preferences further amplifies city-size participation gaps by about one third. Finally, I use the model to evaluate how childcare subsidies and a tax reform reallocate labor across households, occupations, and locations. While both policies effectively raise participation, their aggregate impact depends critically on their spatial scope and sorting responses.
Returns to Size in Local Marriage Markets (with Olatz Román-Blanco)
This paper studies whether there are returns to size in local marriage markets. Using a simple search model of couple formation, we show that rates of couple formation and dissolution are insufficient to identify returns to market size when meeting technologies differ across locations. This is because higher meeting rates increase not only the frequency of encounters but also the option value of remaining single, raising the minimum match quality individuals are willing to accept to enter a relationship. We show that, after accounting for factors affecting marriage markets through channels other than the meeting technology, a measure of match quality is sufficient to identify returns to size. Guided by the model, we empirically study marriage markets using a novel measure of relationship quality. Adapting methods from the labour economics literature to account for endogenous sorting into cities, we find no evidence of decreasing returns to size. Match quality is weakly increasing in market size, while formation and dissolution rates rise with city size, consistent with increasing returns to scale.
Suburbanization and Gender Gaps in Labour Markets (with Clara Santamaría)