Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley Haas School of Business.
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.
You can reach me at oliviabordeu@berkeley.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.
Bank Branches and the Allocation of Capital across Cities
with Gustavo González and Marcos Sorá.We study how banking market structure and branch networks shape the spatial mobility of capital. Using administrative loan-level data from Chile, we show that bank-level deposit shocks lead receiving banks to increase lending and lower interest rates relative to other banks. Interest rate reductions are concentrated in cities where the bank has a small market share, consistent with local market power. We develop and estimate a quantitative spatial model with multi-city banks, oligopolistic local credit markets, and frictions in interbank lending. These channels lead to spatial dispersion in interest rates and the marginal productivity of physical capital, reducing GDP. Interbank frictions reduce steady-state GDP by 0.04%, while spatial variation in loan markups reduces GDP by 0.5%. Bank mergers improve financial integration between cities but reduce competition, generating heterogeneous welfare effects that depend on the merging banks’ geographic overlap.
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 high borrowing costs pay around 280 basis points more than firms in low-cost cities. While these estimates account for differences in firm and loan characteristics across cities, we find evidence that they are related to the level of 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 models of oligopolistic branch competition.