Research

Measuring the Air Pollution Benefits of Public We discuss two approaches to estimating the air quality impacts of public transit projects, focusing on metro projects in the context of developing countries: air quality modeling and reduced-form econometric methods. We show how emissions reductions due to metro projects implied by pollutant chemistry, vehicle emissions factors, and modal shifts may differ from econometric estimates of the impact of transit projects on ambient pollution concentration. We discuss the approaches used in the literature and their strengths and limitations to inform the economics literature on this topic. We also show how economics researchers can ground-truth their estimates using information from the atmospheric chemistry literature.

In this paper, we study the impact of Metro Line 1 in Mumbai on property prices using difference-in-differences in an event study framework. We use administrative data on assessed land values from 2011-18 for 723 sub-zones in the city. Comparing areas within 1 km of the metro with those beyond 1 km but within 3 km, we estimate the effects on property values for commercial, industrial, and residential properties. We find a significant and persistent increase in prices of 7-8% for residential and commercial land use categories in the treated areas relative to the control areas after Metro Line 1. We show that improvements in employment accessibility and other location amenities are plausible mechanisms underlying these effects.

We measure benefits to households from Mumbai's new Metro rail system. We estimate a commute mode choice model to value commute time savings in the short run and a housing choice model to value the improved commuting utility that households experience due to spatial sorting. Aggregate benefits from Metro rail are approximately 10 times higher when spatial sorting occurs. In the short run women, college-educated workers, and workers with above median incomes experience higher benefits than their opposites. In the long run, households with lower incomes and assets benefit more than their wealthier counterparts.

In this paper, we study the effects of the introduction of Metro Line 1 in Mumbai on air pollution. We use data on daily average levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2), sulfur dioxide (SO2), and particulate matter (PM10) from ground monitoring stations in an event study framework to identify the changes in pollution levels following the opening of Metro Line 1. We find a robust and significant reduction in the levels of NO2 and no evidence of changes in PM10 and SO2. We also find a significant reduction in the level of Aerosol Optical Depth measured using satellite data at 1 km resolution.

There is increasing recognition that women experience mobility differently from men. A growing body of literature documents the differences in men and women’s mobility patterns. However, there is limited evidence on the evolution of these mobility patterns over time and the role that transportation networks play in women’s access to economic opportunities. This study attempts to fill these gaps. It contributes to the literature in two ways. First, it documents the differences in men and women’s mobility patterns in Mumbai, India and the changes in these patterns over time, as the city has developed. Second, it explores whether the lack of access to mass transit limits women’s labor force participation. The study analyzes two household surveys conducted in the Greater Mumbai Region in 2004 and 2019. It finds important differences in the mobility patterns of men and women that reflect differences in the division of labor within the household. These differences in mobility patterns, and their evolution over time, point to an implicit “pink tax” on female mobility. Transport appears to be only one of many barriers to women’s labor force participation and not the most important one.

We use a pandemic-driven natural experiment to study the effect of unreliable childcare on the labor supply of prime-age custodial mothers. We explicitly examine whether the telework-compatibility of mothers’ jobs mitigates the effect of increased childcare responsibilities. Using difference-in-differences and triple-differences designs, we find persistent declines in mothers' labor force participation by 0.1 to 1.5 percentage points relative to women without children and 0.3 to 2.0 percentage points compared to custodial fathers. Conditional on employment, mothers are 0.7 to 0.8 percentage points more likely to take up leave. These patterns are especially prominent among custodial mothers with a college degree or higher in telework-compatible jobs.

The police administration in Madhya Pradesh, India recently moved from a decentralized system of recruitment to a centralized one. In this paper, I use administrative data on spatial allocations of newly recruited women police officers made under the deferred acceptance mechanism to estimate their preferences for location amenities. I find robust evidence of a strong preference for proximity to home. Individuals also have a preference for areas with a better formal economy and better infrastructure as measured by health and education facilities and the level of urbanization. However, these amenities are relatively less important than proximity to home. My results imply that under the current system, the distribution of women officers is highly dependent on the pool of origin districts of women applicants, and regions with poor baseline amenities are heavily disadvantaged at attracting women officers. I also compare preferences estimated using a reduced-form gravity equation with those estimated using a discrete choice model and find that the implied preferences are similar only for less constrained choice sets.