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 (Job Market Paper)
Cities are divided into local governments responsible for local commuting infrastructure that is used by both their residents and outsiders. In this paper, I study how metropolitan fragmentation affects the provision of commuting infrastructure and the 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 in their jurisdictions. In equilibrium, relative to a central metropolitan planner, municipalities underinvest in areas near their boundaries and overinvest in core areas away from the boundary. Infrastructure investment in fragmented cities results in higher cross-jurisdiction commuting costs, more dispersed employment, and more polycentric patterns of economic activity. Estimating the model using data from Santiago, Chile, I find substantial gains from centralizing investment decisions. Centralization increases aggregate infrastructure investment and population. More importantly, for a given amount of investment, centralization yields large welfare gains due solely to more efficient infrastructure allocation.
Work in Progress
Investment Costs Across Space: The Role of Banks' Branch Network
with Gustavo González and Marcos Sorá.We study how bank branches' local market power in interest-rate setting and frictions in the interbank market lead to misallocation of investment across cities. Using loan-level data from Chile, we document interest rate differences both across cities within the same bank and between banks within the same city, consistent with the theoretical mechanisms we propose. We develop a quantitative spatial model with banks that allows us to quantify the impact of the bank network on spatial inequality. Preliminary analysis indicates that pro-competitive reforms in the banking sector increase aggregate welfare by 1.63% and lead to significant reductions in spatial inequality.
Presented at (by coauthor or myself): 12th European Meeting of the Urban Economics Association