- Private Transportation Markets and Endogenous Commuting Costs:
Theory and Evidence From Mexico City
Walter Heller Memorial Prize for Best Third-Year Paper
What are the welfare consequences of having private and public transit markets coexisting in a city?
How do different regulations affect this relationship? A key challenge in growing megacities throughout the developing world is mobility.
Relative to richer cities, a crucial distinction of developing megacities is their reliance on private (and often informal) transit.
Do we need to replace these private markets with mass-transit infrastructure? We must understand how the private market
complements existing public infrastructure, and in particular, how it responds to demand and different regulations.
In this paper, I document three key facts of commuting in the Metropolitan Area of Mexico City:
i) privatized transit ("colectivos"/minibuses) account for 4/5 public transit trips, and 1/2 overall trips,
ii) the majority of colectivo trips are multimodal, highlighting the complementarity with publicly-provided mass transit,
and iii) the outskirts of the city are underserved by mass transit systems and rely heavily on private markets.
Motivated by these facts, I build a quantitative spatial model that features mutimodal transportation networks,
private markets responding to market conditions across routes, and commuters trading-off time and income while
choosing their location, (multi) modes, and routes to go to work. The model pins down equilibrium commuting costs: frequencies, congestion, travel times, and tariffs.
I estimate key parameters of the model using exogenous variation from large disruptions in mass transit infrastructure. I
use the model to study the general equilibrium implications of a variety of counterfactuals such as different tariff structures, regulations, or subsidies to entry.
- Domestic Trade Frictions: Road Insecurity in Mexico, with Alfonso Cebreros
How do transportation firms respond to road insecurity and what are the interregional trade consequences?
How large are the welfare effects of these frictions? Over the past decade, violent cargo robbery has been
a growing concern among the transportation sector in Mexico. Despite more international trade openness,
this friction could be mutting some of the gains from trade by potentially distorting trade routes
and prices across regions. We construct a granular crime exposure measure using administrative crime data
and use confidential firm-level data of transportation firms to study a variety of trade and firm-level outcomes.
