Welcome! I am an IES Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University. I will join the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley as an Assistant Professor in 2025.
I am interested in urban and spatial economics. I study the mechanisms behind different geographic costs or frictions, for example, the determinants of commuting costs in cities, migration costs, and capital costs across cities.
I completed my Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 2024.
You can reach me at ogazmuri@princeton.edu
I co-organize the Online Spatial and Urban Seminar (OSUS). Check it out!
Working Papers
Commuting Infrastructure in Fragmented Cities
[R&R at Review of Economic Studies]
Cities are often divided into local governments, each responsible for their local commuting infrastructure used by local residents, workers, and outsiders. This paper examines how metropolitan fragmentation impacts the provision of commuting infrastructure and the spatial distribution of economic activity. I develop a quantitative spatial model in which municipalities compete for residents and workers by investing in commuting infrastructure to maximize net land value within their jurisdictions. In equilibrium, relative to a metropolitan planner, municipalities underinvest in areas near their boundaries and overinvest in areas away from the boundary. Central municipalities tend to underinvest more, as higher commuting costs encourage households to move closer to where they work, thereby increasing land values in central areas. Decentralized investment results in higher cross-jurisdiction commuting costs, more dispersed employment, and more polycentric patterns of economic activity. I estimate the model using data from Santiago, Chile, and find substantial gains from centralizing investment decisions. Centralization allocates infrastructure more efficiently and increases aggregate expenditure on infrastructure.
Work in Progress
Bank Competition and Investment Costs across Space
with Gustavo González and Marcos Sorá.Using detailed loan-level data from Chile, we document significant geographic differences in interest rates for firm loans. Firms in cities with relatively high borrowing costs pay around 280 basis points more than firms in low-cost cities. While these estimates control for different firm and loan compositions across cities, we find evidence that they are related to concentration in the local loan market. We examine the pass-through of monetary policy to lending rates and find that banks with higher local market shares exhibit stronger pass-through, aligning with oligopolistic models of branch competition.
Presented at (by coauthor or myself): 12th European Meeting of the Urban Economics Association