Street vending provides livelihoods for millions of workers across the developing world, yet the sector remains poorly understood and subject to repeated policy interventions that have largely failed. This paper provides a comprehensive microeconomic profile of street vending markets in Patna, Bihar, using original survey data from 2,922 stationary vendors across 206 marketplaces. We document that vendors are deeply embedded in overlapping social, spatial, and economic structures that make their livelihoods far more organized, and far harder to administratively reshape, than standard policy frameworks assume. Entry into vending and product choice are mediated by family networks; labour is almost entirely household-based; procurement is organized through stable relational ties with suppliers; and vendors cluster in spatially differentiated markets from which they derive substantial agglomeration economies. Pricing is implicitly coordinated through shared wholesale cost anchors, and 99 percent of vendors have never changed their marketplace despite operating without legal tenure and facing regular eviction pressure. The regulatory environment compounds this vulnerability: fewer than 2 percent of vendors are aware of the Street Vendors Act of 2014, which was designed to protect them, and over 40 percent report moderate to high psychological distress. We argue that the concept of embeddedness offers a more accurate framework for understanding this sector than the atomistic agent model implicit in most policy interventions, and that formalization efforts, particularly spatial relocation mandates, will continue to fail until they account for the social, spatial, and economic complementarities that sustain vendor livelihoods.

Public investments in urban amenities such as parks, streets, and public transit shape who participates in city life, and their returns may differ by gender. Yet little is known about how the physical structure of the city shapes women's presence in public space, or what the amenities that draw women out are worth to them. I study these questions in Jakarta, where only 1 in 5 adults on the streets is a woman. Applying machine learning to Google Street View imagery (2013–2019), I build a new measure of who uses the city and combine it with administrative population records, a gender-disaggregated commuting survey, and neighbourhood amenity data. I document that women's presence varies systematically across the city with the local amenity mix. Exploiting the staggered rollout of over 300 neighbourhood parks in a difference-in-differences design, I find that the opening of a park raises women's presence nearby, with no change for men and no decline at surrounding locations, and that people sort into treated neighbourhoods. Because presence reflects demand for a location at the prevailing cost of reaching it, these patterns alone cannot say whether women use the city differently because destinations are worth less to them or because access is more costly. To separate these channels, I am developing a gendered quantitative spatial model in which two-member households choose where to live and individuals make daily destination choices subject to gender-specific access costs and location values. Ongoing work uses the model to estimate the worth of an amenity to women and men and to evaluate counterfactual amenity placement.

Street vending is a crucial source of income for millions of people in developing countries, yet vendors often face regulatory uncertainty, evictions, and economic vulnerability due to a lack of formal property rights. In India, where estimates suggest up to 40 million street vendors operate, regulatory policies such as the Street Vendors Act (2014) seek to balance public space management with vendors' rights through relocation to vending areas. However, ineffective implementation, coordination failures, and information frictions hinder their impact. This project investigates how vendors value legal rights and other attributes of a vending space, and how their willingness to relocate varies with beliefs about policy enforcement, particularly in the presence of coordination challenges. We focus on the role of the presence of other vendors while accounting for heterogeneity in vendor responses based on their social networks. To answer this question, we employ a discrete-choice stated-preferences experiment, in which vendors choose between maintaining their current unregulated spot or relocating to a designated vending area with legal security, but at a cost and with a varying number of vendors relocating from the current market as a key coordination variable. The experiment includes an information treatment, in which a subset of vendors is provided with details about policy enforcement, allowing us to assess whether knowledge of regulatory risks alters their willingness to pay. Combining this with a decision-making model of vendor coordination, we quantify the "right" size of a marketplace for which relocation can succeed. Our study is set in Patna, India, where approximately 30,000 street vendors work and where encroachment drives by the local government are a regular practice. The findings may have critical policy implications, particularly for urban local bodies that implement relocation policies.