Wednesday, November 26, 2025 11:00 - 12:00

SAL 1.04, 1st Floor Conference Room, Sir Arthur Lewis Building, LSE, 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PH

About this event

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 S?o 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. Investing in transportation infrastructure that makes commuting equal by gender could have large aggregate and welfare implications.

Participants are expected to adhere to the CEP Events Code of Conduct.

Directions

This event will take place in SAL 1.04, 1st Floor Conference Room, Sir Arthur Lewis Building, LSE, 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PH.

The building is labelled SAL on the LSE campus map. You can also find us on Google Maps. For further information, go to contact us.

International Economics Workshops are part of the CEP's Trade programme.