About

Yuhei Miyauchi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Boston University. His primary research interests include urban economics and international trade. Miyauchi focuses on understanding how socio-economic activity is shaped within cities and across regions by utilizing a combination of theory and new sources of granular data, such as cell phone, smartphone transaction data, and firm-level transaction data. His work aims to provide insights into the dynamics of economic activity in urban and regional contexts, leveraging innovative data sources to address complex economic questions.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Mathematics
• Economics
• Business
• International trade
• Demographic economics
• Microeconomics
• Economic geography
• Geography
• Industrial organization
• Econometrics
• Labour economics

Selected publications

• The Spatial Distribution of Income in Cities: New Global Evidence and Theory

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Unpacking Aggregate Welfare in a Spatial Economy

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-07-01 · 3 citations

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  How do regional productivity shocks or transportation infrastructure improvements affect aggregate welfare?In a general class of spatial equilibrium models, we provide a formula for aggregate welfare changes, decomposed into terms associated with (i) technology (Fogel 1964, Hulten 1978), (ii) spatial dispersion of marginal utility, (iii) fiscal externalities, (iv) technological externalities, and (v) redistribution.We further use this decomposition to derive a general formula for optimal spatial transfers and show that, whenever optimal transfers are in place, the technology term alone captures the aggregate welfare effects of technological shocks.We apply our framework to study welfare gains from improving the US highway network.We find that changes in the spatial dispersion of marginal utility are as important as technological externalities in accounting for the deviations from the Fogel-Hulten benchmark to assess welfare gains.

  PublisherDOI

• The Economics of Spatial Mobility: Theory and Evidence Using Smartphone Data

  The Quarterly Journal of Economics · 2025-08-08 · 13 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT We develop a tractable quantitative framework for modeling the rich patterns of spatial mobility observed in smartphone data. We show that travel is frequently undertaken as part of a travel itinerary, defined as a journey starting and ending at home that can include more than one intermediate stop on a given day. We show that these travel itineraries provide microfoundations for consumption externalities and generate both complementarity and substitutability between locations. We show that the consumption externalities implied by travel itineraries are central to matching quasi-experimental evidence from the shift to working from home. We find that these consumption externalities are key drivers of the agglomeration of economic activity in central cities and shape the relative welfare gains from alternative transport improvements in favor of investments in central cities.

  PublisherDOI

• Unpacking Aggregate Welfare in a Spatial Economy

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 3 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Production Network Formation, Trade, and Welfare

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 2 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Spatial Distribution of Income in Cities: New Global Evidence and Theory

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-11-01 · 1 citations

  report
  PublisherDOI

• Supply Chain Disruption and Reorganization: Theory and Evidence From Ukraine’s War

  The Review of Economic Studies · 2025-09-11 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract How do localized conflicts disrupt supply chains and prompt firms to reorganize them? How do these forces affect firm-level and aggregate economic activity? Using firm-to-firm Ukrainian railway-shipment data before and during the 2014 Russia–Ukraine conflict, we document that firms with prior supplier and buyer exposure to the conflict areas substantially decreased their output. Simultaneously, firms reorganized their production linkages away from partners directly or indirectly exposed to the conflict shock. We build a general-equilibrium production-network model with endogeneous link formation, and we show that our model’s sufficient statistics accurately explains the observed relative decline in firm output once we account for network reorganization. Calibrating our model to the Ukrainian economy, we find that the localized conflict decreased aggregate output in nonconflict areas by 5.5%. This effect increases to 8.4% if we abstract from endogeneous link formation, suggesting that production-network reorganization partially mitigates the detrimental, far-reaching aggregate economic costs of conflicts.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Information Frictions and Network Spillovers in Firm-to-Firm Linkages

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2024-03-11

  dataset1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Information Frictions and Network Spillovers in Firm-to-Firm Linkages

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2024-03-11

  dataset1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Supply Chain Disruption and Reorganization: Theory and Evidence from Ukraine's War

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 14 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Kentaro Nakajima

  NTT Medical Center

  3 shared

• Alexey Makarin

  3 shared

• Stephen J. Redding

  3 shared

• Gabriel Kreindler

  Harvard University

  3 shared

• Federico Huneeus

  2 shared

• Daisuke Miyakawa

  Waseda University

  2 shared

• Jie Bai

  2 shared

• Lauren Bergquist

  2 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology