Working Papers
Working Papers
Delayed Childbearing and Urban Revival: A Structural Approach (with Clara Santamaría) (August 2025: new draft!)
Neighborhood amenities, such as nurseries or restaurants, cater to the local presence of children. This creates a two-way causal relationship between urban structure and aggregate fertility. In this paper, we focus on the link between urban revival and delayed childbearing. As high-income households postpone parenthood, they increase their presence downtown, shaping the supply of local amenities. As a result, it becomes more attractive to live downtown and to delay childbearing. To quantify this mechanism, we build a dynamic spatial model with endogenous fertility. The estimation exploits variation in access to infertility treatments to identify the response of amenities to the share of childless households. Delayed childbearing account 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 fertility decline. Our results reveal important demographic implications of spatial dynamics.
Mums and the City: Household Labour Supply and Location Choice (new draft coming soon!)
Best Student Paper Honourable Mention, 2020 Urban Economics Association Virtual Meeting
This paper examines the interaction between city choice and labour supply decisions in a two-member household. Using data for the United States, I document substantial variation in labour force participation and hours worked across cities, especially among women with children. I build a quantitative spatial model that reproduces the observed differences in labour supply between small and big cities and use it to show that (i) labour supply decisions are affected by the city where the household lives; (ii) households' preferences for work influence their choice of city. Finally, I use the model to evaluate the importance of spatial frictions on gender gaps in the labour market and the effectiveness of policies aiming at increasing female labour supply.
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)