Research

Working Papers: 

"Accessibility Benefits from Informal Transit: Evidence from Greater Mexico City" [Job Market Paper]

Reliable urban mobility connects people to jobs, services, and opportunities, yet traditional public transit networks often leave spatial and temporal gaps. Flexible mobility services have emerged to complement these networks, and in many developing-country cities, informally operated minibuses fill these gaps. This paper estimates how travelers value different transit options and quantifies their effects on accessibility and welfare. A key challenge is that travel surveys record chosen trips but not the alternatives each traveler could have taken. I address this by constructing trip-specific choice sets that combine more than one million synthetic Google Maps trip queries with 450,000 trips from a household travel survey. The Google Maps queries cover diverse origin-destination pairs at randomly sampled departure times and report feasible formal, informal, and mixed-mode routes, along with fares and travel times. I match these routes to 98% of surveyed trips based on origin, destination, and departure time, recovering the availability and attributes of chosen and unchosen alternatives. I find that informal transit improves connectivity by filling gaps in the formal network, but at a higher monetary cost. I estimate a discrete-choice model that captures mode availability, time-cost trade-offs, and traveler heterogeneity. To identify travel preferences, I exploit variation in travel time and cost generated by route geometry and institutional features. Counterfactual analyses show that formalizing key informal routes connecting peripheral areas to the urban center would lower travel costs, close residual coverage gaps, and generate welfare gains for all traveler groups, with the largest gains for low-income travelers. [Draft available upon request]

Works in progress:

"What Informal Transit Actually Does: Large-Scale Evidence from Greater Mexico City" 

"Commuting Informally: Transit and Employment in Greater Mexico City"