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.
Until the City Do Us Part: The Determinants of Relationship Quality (with Olatz Román-Blanco)
In this project, we exploit geographical differences in marriage markets to unveil the main determinants of relationship quality as well as couple formation and dissolution. Using data for the United Kingdom, we show that big cities are characterized by a larger proportion of singles and by a lower stability of newly formed couples as compared to small cities. However, we also find that the risk of couple dissolution decreases faster in bigger cities and that the relationship quality of couples deteriorates at a slower pace. We then build a dynamic quantitative model of couple formation and dissolution that allows us to account for the endogeneity of location decisions and to quantify the importance of each mechanism in resulting relationship quality.
Suburbanization and Gender Gaps in Labour Markets (with Clara Santamaría)