Jordán Mosqueda Juárez
I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Economics at the University of California San Diego. I am on the 2025-2026 Job Market.
Broadly, I am interested in understanding how different costs and frictions prevent the flow of agents and goods across space, and the implications for workers, firms, and welfare. In my research I combine quantitative tools from International Trade and rich spatial microdata to study questions related to urban mobility, transportation, and regional integration.Prior to my doctoral studies, I was an Economist at the Bank of Mexico researching issues on the industrial organization of the energy sector.
I have been recognized as 2026 Young Urban Economist by the IGC/World Bank, and have received the Clive Granger Research Award for Most Promising Graduate Student Research and the Walter Heller Memorial Prize for Best Third-Year Paper; awarded by UCSD.
You can find my CV here, and contact me at: jmosqued@ucsd.edu
Research Interests
Trade, Spatial Economics, Urban Economics, Macroeconomics, and Economic Development.
You can find my research statement here.
Work in progress
- Equilibrium Commuting Costs: The Role of Private and Public Transit (Job Market Paper)
- Domestic Trade Frictions: Road Insecurity in Mexico,
- Optimal Transit Networks in Developing Countries,
Clive Granger Research Award for Most Promising Graduate Student Research
Walter Heller Memorial Prize for Best Third-Year Paper
Developing cities rely on a mix of private minibuses and public transit, with many commutes being multimodal. This paper investigates how private providers’ decisions shape commuting costs considering complementarities with the public network, and the welfare and spatial consequences of policies that directly shift prices such as fare regulation and subsidies. I develop a quantitative spatial model in which commuters choose multimodal routes and private providers shape commuting costs through entry, pricing, and frequencies, affecting congestion and network-wide costs. The model is disciplined with newly-collected geographic and service data covering the near-universe of transit lines in the Mexico City metropolitan area. To identify key substitution and congestion elasticities, I exploit road-link-level speed changes induced by an exogenous subway-line collapse. Counterfactual analyses suggest that price-based policies can generate welfare gains comparable to infrastructure expansions. The mechanisms underscore that the endogenous response of the private sector and network-wide cost interactions are central to understand the effects of transit interventions.
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.
What is the optimal transit network in a city where a budget-constrained planner can choose between different transit technologies? In particular, where is it optimal for a government to build and provide mass transit relative to letting private/informal transit operate? What are the welfare consequences of different allocations of public vs private transit? Mass transit is a fixed-cost-intensive technology with very low marginal costs to transport people. Informal transit involves low fixed costs but high marginal costs of operation, and generates externalities. A planner that cannot connect the full city with efficient technologies due to high initial investments, may be interested in the optimal deployment of second-best alternatives that connect the city. We extend the trade framework of Fajgelbaum and Schaal (2020) to commuting, and study the optimal allocation of different transit technologies across different edges in the network.