Jordán Mosqueda Juárez

Trade, Spatial Economics, Urban Economics, Macroeconomics, and Economic Development.

You can find my research statement here.

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.

A key allocation problem for budget-constrained governments in developing cities is where and how much to build public mass transit infrastructure, relative to allowing privatized and often informal transit operators to operate. We study the optimal transit network problem in general spatial equilibrium, where a planner can choose between technologies to connect locations within a city. We show that the optimal public-private transit mix on any given edge of the network depends crucially on the trade-off between relative marginal and fixed costs across technologies. Leveraging a unique dataset of public and private transit networks in Mexico City and a battery of wages, land use, and commuting flows microdata, we quantitatively study the gains from budget-feasible expansions of the transit system. We find that increasing the infrastructure budget by 50% raises welfare by 4.4% under public-only expansion and by 5.2% when both public and private transit can expand optimally, with the additional 18% welfare gain driven by private transit. In both cases, optimal investments primarily improve connections from peripheral areas to productive outer nodes and towards the existing network. Developing cities could benefit substantially by jointly designing public and private networks, rather than public mass transit in isolation.

How do transportation firms respond to road insecurity and what are the interregional trade consequences? What are the welfare effects from crime? Over the past decade, violent cargo robbery, extortion, and vehicle theft have 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, use confidential firm-level data of transportation firms, and detailed origin-destination agricultural wholesale prices to study how crime affects transportation firms’ costs, trade flows, and prices. We build a trade model with firms exposed to crime to assess the welfare consequences of crime.

Press mentions: El Universal