Working Papers
Delayed Childbearing and Urban Revival (with Clara Santamaría) (new draft!)
Since 1980, college graduates have increasingly sorted into the downtowns of U.S. cities. This led to urban revival, a process that involves fast growth in income and housing prices downtown. Motivated by the observation that young childless households concentrate downtown, we link urban revival to delayed childbearing. As college graduates postpone parenthood, more of them are childless when young and locate downtown. Estimating a dynamic model of fertility timing and within-city location choices, we find delayed childbearing accounts for 52% of urban revival. The impact of changes in fertility choices is amplified by the response of housing prices and amenities.
CEPR discussion paper, CRC discussion paper, Blog post, CRC Interview
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.
Work in Progress
Until the City Do Us Part: The Determinants of Relationship Quality (with Belén Rodríguez-Moro and 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)
Housing Price and Family Formation (with Belén Rodríguez-Moro and Christopher Severen)