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 frictions in interbank lending and imperfect competition within local credit markets shape the allocation of capital across cities. Using public and administrative data from Chile, we estimate the pass-through of bank-level deposit shocks to local lending and interest rates. We find the pass-through to be stronger in cities where the bank holds a smaller market share, consistent with imperfect competition. We develop and estimate a quantitative spatial model with multi-city banks, oligopolistic competition in local credit markets, and interbank lending frictions that rationalizes these results. In the model, the cost of credit varies in space as banks with greater deposit funding lend at lower rates in all markets they serve, and cities served by more competing bank branches face lower rates through stronger local competition. We find that capital misallocation arising from spatial variation in loan markups reduces steady-state GDP by 0.55 percent, while frictions in interbank lending reduce GDP by 0.1 percent. We then use the model to evaluate bank mergers, which trade off greater spatial financial integration against weaker local competition, with larger competition losses when merging banks overlap in more cities. In Chile, the competition losses outweigh the gains from integration.
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.