Keywords: economics, education, gender, behavioural economics, choice under uncertainty, adolescent risk behaviours, development economics, poverty, inequality, early childhood development, skills formation, education trajectories, labour market outcomes, the role of aspirations and subjective expectations as potential self-enforcing mechanisms underlying inequalities, poverty inequality, gender inequality, development economics

Biography

Marta is Director of Research, Young Lives. She joined the Young Lives team in 2015 and since then she has been leading the research team. Marta is a development economist. Her main research interests include labour economics, education economics, and behavioural economics.

She has a PhD in Economics from the University of Essex (UK) and a Masters in Economics from the University of Leuven (Belgium). She has also been an IZA research affiliate since 2012 and a Researcher Fellow with the Oxford Martin Programme on African Governance since 2018.

Before joining Young Lives, Marta worked as an economist at the World Bank (Young Professionals Programme) in the Poverty, Inequality and Gender Unit for the Latin America and Caribbean Region and in the Education Unit for the Africa Region. She has worked in several research projects, survey designs, impact evaluations and policy dialogue with public and private institutions in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.

Research Interest

  • Development economics,
  • labour economics
  • education economics
  • behavioural economics