Estimados Académicos y Académicas FEN,

Les extendemos la invitación al seminario que organiza el Departamento de Economía, en el que se presentará el trabajo titulado "Inmigration, Slums, and Spatial Misallocation".

Expone: Raimundo Undurraga, Profesor Asistente, Centro de Economía Aplicada, UChile.

Co-autor: Marcos Gonzalez-Navarro.

Abstract: Although slums are often viewed negatively due to their negative impact on welfare and human development, slums provide affordable housing in cities with high productivity, and in so doing can play an important role in reducing labor misallocation over space. Specifically, slum formation increases the elasticity of housing supply, generating larger employment effects -as opposed to labor misallocation in the form of higher wages and housing rents. Leveraging a unique yearly panel dataset that includes all formal and informal housing records in Chile throughout the past decade, we provide causal evidence that international migration has boosted the demand for both types of housing. Second, we exploit the immigration-driven exogenous shift in formal and informal housing demand to derive estimates of formal housing supply elasticity and the corresponding marginal contribution of slum housing. We find formal housing supply elasticity in Chile is 1.42, which is close to the U.S., yet accounting for slums increases the elasticity of housing supply to 1.64, making it 15 percent more elastic. Third, we observe spatial wages and housing rents dispersion fell over the past decade, while employment expanded, especially in high TFP municipalities where slum growth was greater, suggesting slum formation reduced spatial misallocation of labor. Using a spatial equilibrium model, we calculate the aggregate effects of local changes in housing supply elasticity derived from slum formation, and find that slum growth allowed for 3.5 to 5 percent higher national output growth.

El formato será presencial y el seminario se desarrollará en la Sala P-303.

Saludos cordiales,

Dirección de Investigación