Costas is a Research Fellow of the Institute. He is also Professor of Economics at Yale University and Visiting Professor at University College London. His research interests are Econometrics, Public policy, Labor economics, Economics of education, Microeconometrics, Evaluation of public policy, Household behavior, Retirement and pensions, Income distribution, Consumption, Demand analysis, Investment and Development economics.
Education
PhD Economics, University of Manchester, 1985
MA (with Distinction) Economics, University of Manchester, 1980
BA (1st Class Honours) Economics and Econometrics, University of Manchester, 1979
This paper analyses the career progression of skilled and unskilled workers, with a focus on how careers are affected by economic downturns and whether formal skills, acquired early on, can shield workers from the effect of recessions.
This paper studies the intergenerational effects of maternal education on children's cognitive achievement, behavioural problems, grade repetition, and obesity, using matched data from the female participants of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and their children.
Using data from an experiment conducted in 70 Colombian communities, we investigate who pools risk with whom when trust is crucial for enforcing risk pooling arrangements.
In this paper, we use an economic model to analyse data from a major randomized social experiment, namely PROGRESA in Mexico, and to evaluate its impact on school participation.
Previous empirical literature has found a sharp decline in consumption during the first years of retirement, implying that individuals do not save enough for their retirement. This phenomenon is called the retirement consumption puzzle. We find no evidence of the retirement consumption puzzle using panel data from 1980 to 2000.
We develop an empirical search-matching model with productivity shocks so as to analyze policy interventions in a labour market with heterogeneous agents.
