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 , LISER,  and Priyam Verma, Ashoka University) 

Publications

Book Chapters

• Freitas, D., 2026. 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

• The Growth–Affordability Trade-off in Zoning (with Gabriel Ahlfeldt, Jan Bakker, Nina Gläser)

Abstract: We develop and quantify a spatial general equilibrium model to study growth–affordability trade-offs in land-use zoning. The model is disciplined using a unique micro-geographic dataset covering commercial and residential rents, employment, and wages for all of Germany. Counterfactual simulations show that constraining residential supply lowers office rents, fosters agglomeration and productivity, and raises output, but increases housing costs and harms low-skilled workers. Conversely, prioritizing residential development improves affordability and benefits low-skilled households, yet dampens productivity and wage growth. Our results highlight fundamental distributional trade-offs embedded in zoning policy and their implications for welfare and inequality.