Salle 3001

Caterina Soto-Vieira – LSE (LSE) “Home Production in the City ”

Abstract:  By 2050, two thirds of the world’s population is predicted to live in cities, predominantly mega-cities. Agglomeration drives up productivity, but the commuting costs may act as a brake by incentivizing specialization within the household, and thus potentially decreasing female labor force participation. Using origin-destination travel data from the mega city of Sao Paulo in Brazil, I document that labor force participation declines sharply with distance from the city center, a spatial gradient largely driven by married women. When women work, they not only face lower wages, but also commute in slower modes of transport, relying more often on public transport and less on driving than men. To quantify the implications of these patterns for the economy, I model the trade-off between benefits of agglomeration and the cost of commuting using a quantitative spatial framework in which couples and singles decide where to live and whether and where to work. My model reveals that if women faced the same commuting costs as men, labor force participation would increase by 10.3 percentage points—an effect larger than equalizing labor market returns by gender—with especially strong impacts for married women on the urban periphery. This shows that investing in transportation infrastructure that makes commuting equal by gender would draw many women into the labor market, substantially narrowing the gender gap in labor supply.