Dimitria Freitas

Job Market Paper

• Public Sector Relocation and Regional Development in Germany  (Job Market Paper)

Abstract: As regional economic disparities within countries grow, governments are increasingly experimenting with public employment reallocation as a place-based policy. In this paper, I estimate the causal effect on local labor markets of a German policy that relocated about 3,000 public sector jobs to lagging regions. Using novel data on 60 agency relocations from 2015–2025, I estimate employment and population effects for receiving and sending municipalities and use the results to discipline a quantitative spatial model that simulates spatial reallocation and welfare effects. I find that relocations increased private employment shares by up to 2.3% (1.3 percentage points), reduced unemployment by up to 11.9% (0.33 percentage points), and raised population by 1.6%, implying a public-to-private jobs multiplier of 1.08 in receiving locations. Sending locations also see an increase in private sector employment that is rationalized in the model by within-private-sector spillovers exceeding public-to-private sector spillovers. 

Awards: SOLE Poster Prize Winner at the 6th World Labor Conference in Toronto, Canada.

60 Second Pitch here.

Working Papers

• Do place-based policies matter at the poll? (with Luisa Doerr and Florian Dorn, ifo Munich)

• The Drivers of Far-Right Populism in Western Democracies (with Patrick Zwerschke)

• A comment on Xu (2022) Reshaping Global Trade: The Immediate and Long-Term Effects of Bank Failures (with Guillaume Bérard , Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER),  and Priyam Verma, Aix-Marseille Univ, CNRS, EHESS, AMSE, Marseille, France) 

Publications

Book Chapters

• Freitas, D., 2024. The Potential of Public Employment Reallocation as a Place-Based Policy (NBER Chapters). National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. (edited by Cecile Gaubert, Gordon H. Hanson, and David Neumark)

Policy Papers

• Freitas, D., Syga, S., 2022. "35 cents less for gasoline and 17 cents less for diesel - The fuel tax reduction was passed on to consumers – on average." ifo Dresden berichtet 29, 13–18. Coverage: [DNN], [Bundeskartellamt - German Competition Authority], [Bundestag - German Parliament]

Work in Progress

• Does Surveillance Reduce Support for Far-Right Populist Parties? (with Simon Syga, CIDS TU Dresden)