Olivia Bordeu

ifo/CESifo Visiting Researcher

Olivia Bordeu, University of California, Berkeley, CESifo Guest from 6 to 11 July 2026.

Bank Branches and the Allocation of Capital across Cities

In this paper, Olivia Bordeu (with Gustavo González and Marcos Sorá) uses Chilean data to examine how bank branch locations and imperfect competition shape capital allocation across cities. Empirically, bank-level deposit shocks raise lending and lower interest rates, with larger effects where local markets are more competitive. The researchers build and estimate a quantitative spatial model featuring oligopolistic banks and frictional interbank lending, finding that spatial misallocation from market power lowers GDP by 0.52 percentage points, while interbank frictions matter little.

Ms. Bordeu’s research lies at the intersection of urban, spatial, and public economics, with a focus on how infrastructure, local governments, and market frictions shape the spatial allocation of economic activity. Her work combines structural spatial models with rich administrative data to study questions such as public investment under political decentralization, coordination across local governments, and local banking market power. 

Olivia Bordeu is an Assistant Professor in the Real Estate and Urban Economics group at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. Before joining Berkeley in 2025, she was an IES Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University (2024–2025). She earned her PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 2024, and holds an MA in Economics from the University of Chicago and a BS in Civil Engineering from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.