Research

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 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 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.

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.

Worker preferences play a fundamental role in shaping spatial inequalities in labor markets and access to public goods. Leveraging administrative data from a large-scale police recruitment in Madhya Pradesh, India, and the theoretical properties of the Deferred Acceptance (DA) mechanism, I estimate police officers' location preferences. Women value proximity to home more than men (12% vs. 7% of base pay). Both prefer areas with better infrastructure, but women also prefer locations with lower rates of sexual assaults. Since women constitute a small share of the police force, these preferences produce spatial mismatches under DA, leaving some high-need regions underserved. Base pay is uniform across locations, giving high-amenity districts an implicit advantage in attracting women officers. Counterfactuals introducing targeted wage premiums show how differentiated compensation could change the spatial distribution of women officers.

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.

This paper quantifies agglomeration economies across 109 U.S. metropolitan areas using a unified spatial equilibrium framework with granular geo-spatial employment data from LODES. It tests the determinants of heterogeneity in agglomeration elasticity and whether agglomeration strength predicts the success of the Opportunity Zones implemented under the US Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

We study the joint location decisions of residents and accommodation and food service businesses (NAICS 72) across Seattle census tracts before and after COVID-19. The correlation between changes in residents and NAICS 72 employment reversed from positive before COVID to negative afterward, despite increased spatial intermingling between the two groups. To explain these patterns, we extend the quantitative spatial equilibrium framework of Ahlfeldt et al. 2015 to incorporate multiple industries, industry-specific commuting costs, endogenous residential amenities, and the entry decisions of non-tradable firms. We parameterize the model using LODES data, King County property transactions, and a Bartik instrumental-variables strategy to estimate the Fréchet shape parameter. Lasso estimates identify food services (NAICS 722) as the strongest predictor of changes in residential amenities. We use the calibrated model to examine whether post-COVID spatial reorganization is consistent with preferences for social distancing while preserving the benefits of proximity to commercial activity.

The paper tests whether various Metro Rail projects in Mumbai led to reductions in air pollution and mortality using RD-in-time and DiD methods.