Marta Monturiol

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick and a Research Associate at CAGE Research Centre.

I obtained my Ph.D. in Economics from Pompeu Fabra University in 2019.

Main fields of research: International Trade, Urban economics.

Secondary field: Development Economics.

In 2020/2021, I am co-organising the Online Spatial and Urban Seminar (OSUS)

Working papers

Reshaping Infrastructure: Evidence from the division of Germany [PDF]

Awarded the Best Student Paper Award at the 9th European Meeting of the Urban Economics Association, Best Paper Prize at the 19TH RIEF Conference and Young Economist Award by the European Economic Association.

Can governments adjust transportation infrastructure to unexpected economic changes? This paper studies the importance of flexibility in the development of a transport network exploiting the division of Germany. To understand the incentives behind infrastructure construction, I develop a multi-region quantitative trade model with endogenous infrastructure choice and calibrate it to the prewar German economy. I exploit the division of Germany, an exogenous change in borders, to test the ability of the model to predict highway development before and after the division. Using newly collected data, I document that the West German government considerably reshaped the highway network after the division shock. The reshaping of the network increased aggregate welfare by 1.24% to 2.13%. However, this reshaping was constrained by the part of the network developed before the division. I quantify the cost of path-dependence from these pre-division highway links. The ability to reshape the full network could have increased aggregate welfare by an additional 1.86%.

Borders within Europe, with Jaume Ventura and Ugur Yesilbayraktar [PDF]

Are country borders still an impediment to trade flows within Europe? Using a rich microlevel survey with 3 million annual shipments of goods by road across 269 European regions, we construct a matrix of bilateral trade flows for 12 industries from 2011 to 2017. We then use the causal inference framework to design an identification strategy to estimate the causal effect of country borders on trade flows. Take two similar region pairs, the first one containing regions in different countries and the second one containing regions in the same country. The market share of the origin region in the destination region for the international pair is only 17.5 percent that of the intranational pair. We refer to this estimate as the average border effect. When we look at each industry separately, we find border effects that range from 12.3 to 38.9 percent. When we look at recent borders, i.e. created after 1910, we find a border effect of 28.8 percent, which is smaller than the average border effect but still quite large. The implication is clear: Europe is far from having a single market.

Publications

Texting Complaints to Politicians: Name Personalization and Politicians' Encouragement in Citizen Mobilization [PDF]

with Guy Grossman and Kristin Michelitch, 2017. Comparative Political Studies, 50 (10): 1325-1357

Media coverage: Innovations for Poverty Action blog [LINK]

Poor public service provision and government accountability is commonplace in low-income countries. Although mobile phone-based platforms have emerged to allow constituents to report service deficiencies to government officials, they have been plagued by low citizen participation. We question whether low participation may root in low political efficacy to politically participate. In the context of a text-message reporting platform in Uganda, we investigate the impact of adding efficacy-boosting language to mobilization texts - (a) citizen name personalization and (b) politician encouragement - on citizens' willingness to report service deficiencies to politicians via text messages. Both treatments, designed to increase internal and external efficacy, respectively, have a large, positive effect on participation. The results are driven by traditionally less internally efficacious constituents (females and less externally efficacious constituents (those represented by opposition party members), respectively.

Research Interests

• International Trade
• Urban Economics
• Development Economics

Teaching

• EC205: Development Economics - Macroeconomics
• EC900: Topics in Development Economics

Work in Progress

• "The Gains from Reshaping Infrastructure: Evidence from the Division of Germany"
• "Measuring Borders within Europe", with Jaume Ventura and Ugur Yesilbayraktar.

Journal Publications

• "Texting Complaints to Politicians: Name Personalization and Politicians' Encouragement in Citizen Mobilization" with Guy Grossman and Kristin Michelitch, 2017. Comparative Political Studies, 50 (10): 1325-1357