Displacement and Infrastructure Provision: Evidence from the Interstate Highway System Best Student Paper Prize 2024, Urban Economics Association. Dissertation Award 2025, Transportation and Public Utilities Group. Frank Lewis Memorial Prize for Best Student Paper 2025, CNEH. Last version: September 2026.
This paper studies the long-run effects of the Interstate Highway System on displaced individuals and their neighbors.
I identify individuals in the 1950 census living in homes later destroyed by construction and those living near the constructed highway, and link them to administrative mortality records.
Displaced individuals die younger and move to worse neighborhoods within the city, relative to comparable neighbors living farther from the highway (100 to 200 meters away).
Longevity also declines among those living adjacent to the highway (within 100 meters).
The cost of relocation and the erosion of housing wealth seem to explain these results.
@misc{valenzuela-casasempere2025displacement,
title = {Displacement and Infrastructure Provision: Evidence from the Interstate Highway System},
author = {Pablo Valenzuela-Casasempere},
year = {2026}
}
Neighborhood Evolution and Infrastructure Provision Last version: October 2024.
This paper examines the long-run socioeconomic impact of highway construction on U.S. neighborhoods.
I construct a balanced panel of neighborhood-level characteristics from 1930 to 2020 for 62 metropolitan areas by combining data from historical census records and decennial censuses.
Neighborhood-level aggregates for 1930 and 1940 are created by geocoding address-level information from historical files and then aggregating the data to match census tract boundaries.
Using a matched difference-in-differences design, I find that highway construction reduces the total population of neighborhoods.
The effects are driven by a relative decline in the Black population, with no significant effect on the white population.
There is no evidence of changes in rents, but homeownership rates decrease following highway construction.
The analysis suggests that these effects are more pronounced in suburban areas and in neighborhoods with a low initial share of Black residents.
Additionally, I find evidence of spillover effects on adjacent neighborhoods.
@misc{valenzuela-casasempere2024neighborhoods,
title = {Neighborhood Evolution and Infrastructure Provision},
author = {Pablo Valenzuela-Casasempere},
year = {2024}
}
Does the College Bias of Agglomeration Externalities Vary Across the Work-Cycle and Time? Last version: October 2024.
This paper documents the heterogeneous rise in the urban gradient of the college wage gap across workers of different ages between 1980 and 2019.
Using immigrants' enclaves from 1970 as source of identification, I find that the young workers have traditionally had a steeper relationship between college wage gap and city population than old workers.
Also, I find that the evolution of this urban gradient of the college wage gap has been larger for younger workers.
These findings are not caused by sorting in unobserved characteristics, by outliers in the wage distribution, or by compositional changes.
I show that the source of the increase in the urban component of the college wage gap is a shift in the occupational structure across the work-cycle and cities.
While old and young college workers have shifted away from highly-routinary-low-paying jobs, specially in more populated cities, young high school graduates’ occupational structure has remained unaltered since 1980.
@misc{valenzuela-casasempere2024wageineq,
title = {Does the College Bias of Agglomeration Externalities Vary Across the Work-Cycle and Time?},
author = {Pablo Valenzuela-Casasempere},
year = {2024}
}
Work in progress
Employment Relief and Cities: Evidence from the Works Progress Administration with Kaan Cankat and Allison Green.
In-Situ versus Relocation: The Welfare Consequences of Slum Clearances on Urban Development with Fernanda Rojas-Ampuero.
We analyze the formation of immigrant enclaves in Canada.
We develop a quantitative model of internal city structure in which, in every period, heterogeneous forward-looking individuals choose where to live based on home prices and endogenous amenities.
We allow preferences over endogenous amenities to depend on immigration status.
We estimate the model by microfounding, within canonical quantitative spatial models, a revealed-preference approach that follows recent developments in labor economics for estimating non-pay amenities (Sorkin, 2018).
To estimate the model, we use Canadian administrative tax files from 1991 to 2021.
We document that the correlation of neighborhood valuations between foreign- and Canadian-born households is positive but far from unity.
Neighborhood valuations are closer for groups that share a cultural background (Western European/U.S.) and belong to the same income group (high vs. low).
Differences in valuations create spatial segregation in the city, but they also lower home prices by reducing housing competition.
Human Capital Spillovers Across Cities with Giulia Lo Forte.
Una Restricción Vehicular Inteligente para la Congestión y Contaminación de Santiago with JP Montero, L. Basso, F. Sepúlveda, L. Cifuentes, and S. Vicuña. In Spanish. [Draft] ·
Ante los persistentes problemas de congestión y contaminación en la ciudad de Santiago, avanzamos en una propuesta de política pública de restricción vehicular que se construye a partir de iniciativas impulsadas en el pasado por el Ministerio de Medio Ambiente y el Ministerio de Transporte y Telecomunicaciones. Se trata de un diseño “inteligente”, porque: (i) lleva a un aumento importante (aunque menor que el máximo posible) de bienestar en la población, tanto por reducciones en tiempos de viaje como de contaminantes locales y globales; (ii) incluye medidas para distribuir los beneficios de la política en forma más equitativa entre los distintos grupos de ingreso; y (iii) tiene factibilidad política de implementación, ya que comparte elementos de propuestas existentes o bajo consideración. Nuestra propuesta base incluye una restricción de dos días a la semana (cuatro dígitos diarios) durante horas punta, con una opción de eximición, previo pago de un pase diario que depende del tipo de vehículo y época del año. De octubre a marzo, el pase diario estaría disponible a todo vehículo a un precio de $9.000. De abril a septiembre, el pase diario estaría disponible solo para vehículos que cumplan con la normativa de emisión Euro III. El total de la recaudación de los pases diarios se destina al transporte público, ya sea para mejorar su servicio (aumentos de frecuencia) y/o reducir sus tarifas. En caso que el 100% de la recaudación se destine a esto último, las tarifas caerían en 35%.
Pre-doctoral work
Air Pollution and Road Safety Last version: December 2017.
I link 6-hour air pollution exposure to the total number of car accidents in the city of Santiago by exploiting time-series variation from 2013 to 2016.
In order to identify the causal effect of CO exposure, I use plausible exogenous variation in atmospheric stability to instrument CO exposure.
I found a nonlinear relationship between CO exposure and the total number of car accidents.
This result is driven by nonfatal accidents.
Indeed, I do not find any impact on fatal accidents.
In addition, the results hold under a battery of robustness checks.
Although Santiago’s CO level is far below the international criteria of a hazardous level, I argue that reducing the average level of pollution leads to a sizable increase in social welfare due to a reduction in the number of car accidents.
@misc{valenzuela-casasempere2017airpollution,
title = {Air Pollution and Road Safety},
author = {Pablo Valenzuela-Casasempere},
year = {2017}
}