Browsing by Author " Astroza, Sebastián"

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    Mobility Changes, Teleworking, and Remote Communication during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Chile
    (2020) Astroza, Sebastián; Tirachini, Alejandro ; Hurtubia Gonzalez, Ricardo Daniel; Carrasco, Juan Antonio; Guevara, Angelo; Munizaga, Marcela; Figueroa, Macarena; Torres, Valentina
    Results from a mobility survey from Chile during the COVID-19 pandemic show a decrease of 44% of trips in Santiago, with metro (55%), ride-hailing (51%), and bus (45%) presenting the highest reduction. Modes with the lowest reduction are motorcycle (28%), auto (34%), and walking (39%). While 77% of workers from low-income households had to go out and work, 80% of workers from high-income households worked from home. Other important factors that correlate with teleworking are gender, educational level, employment status, and occupation. Regarding the number of trips for purposes other than work, significant factors are gender, age, and employment status.
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    On the relation between school and residential location choice: Evidence of heterogeneous strategies from Santiago de Chile
    (Elsevier SCI LTD, 2022) González Espejo, Felipe José; Astroza, Sebastián; Hurtubia González, Ricardo; CEDEUS (Chile)
    Voucher systems have been vastly discussed on their ability to provide better quality education and more efficient school systems, but also on the role they play on segregation mechanisms through education markets. With free school choice, parents' preferences and the trade-offs they take into account become relevant, as they are free to decide between educational alternatives and are not restricted to their geographical location's school assignment. In this context, the Chilean case is a singular one due to its nationwide, unrestricted, system implementation. Chilean household's preferences have shown to be complex, heterogeneous, and tightly bound to socioeconomic attributes, as well as deeply intertwined with residential location, especially in Santiago, being a source for social and spatial inequities distributed around the city. Comprehending household's sensitivities on both of these choices and their interactions is essential for understanding the city's complex urban and social structure. This paper seeks to understand the existing bond between school and residential location choices through discrete choice models. By constructing a dataset based on Santiago's 2012 travel survey, a latent class mixed logit model was estimated, capturing observed and unobserved factors that determine household's preferences on both choices. The latent class approach defines two different choice strategies: households that prioritize residential location, and households that prioritize school choice. This enables characterization of households' preferences and choice structures. Main findings suggest both strategies are identifiable through household's characteristics, capturing heterogeneity in household's preferences. In addition, unobserved factors linked to access to office opportunities and neighborhood's socioeconomic level in both school and residential locations explain the correlation binding both choices, capturing heterogeneity. Results suggest that, for both segments, distance tends to be a relevant attribute when choosing. Also, households that prioritize school over residential location tend to be more elastic to socioeconomic characteristics in comparison to households that prioritize residence over school. These 'school first' decision-makers are characterized by higher incomes, possession of cars, and more residential mobility due to not being homeowners. Understanding this bond, and household's behavior regarding it, should allow policymakers to better plan for the reduction of social and spatial urban inequalities.
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    Using Disaggregated and Latent Variable Analysis to Investigate the Role of Socioeconomic Factors in Concerns and Expectations Related to the Covid-19 Pandemic in Chile
    (2022) Tirachini, Alejandro; Guevara, Angelo; Munizaga, Marcela; Carrasco, Juan Antonio; Astroza, Sebastián; Hurtubia González, Ricardo
    The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a complex set of psychosocial effects, such as anxiety, depression, financial loss, burnout, and fear of infection. We study the role of socioeconomic factors in the concerns related to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the expectations of social changes on a post-pandemic future. The analysis is performed by collecting 22 indicators from a sample of 4,395 adults in Chile. The analysis is performed first by descriptive statistics, then by fusing the indictors into three latent variables, and finally by modelling each indicator as a separate choice. We find that lower-income people are significantly more worried about a range of financial and health issues arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, including concerns about being infected by the virus, losing their job and not being able to pay debts. The concern about facing a large economic crisis is significantly larger in the extremes, i.e., for low- and high-income groups. Age, gender, having a university degree, the possibility of working from home, and the general health status also influence the fears related to the COVID-19 pandemic. From a policy point of view, we conclude that strong policy interventions are necessary to reduce the uneven negative effects of COVID-19 in society, including material and mental health problems. From a methodological point of view, our results show that, while using a latent variable approach allows disentangling the main drivers of the phenomenon, rich content may be omitted when a disaggregated analysis is neglected, therefore both approaches are complementary.