Monica is an Associate Director at the IFS and a Research Economist at the Centre for Economics and Finance, University of Porto. Her research interests are mainly on Labour Economics and the Economics of Education, with a focus on the determinants of individual and household choices, including human capital investments, labour supply and intra-household allocation of resources, and their consequences for inequality and the evaluation and design of tax and welfare policies
Education
PhD Economics, University College London, 2002
MA Economics, New University of Lisbon, 1997
BA Applied Mathematics to Economics and Management, Technical University of Lisbon, 1995
This briefing note summarises a project that took a life-cycle perspective to understand how taxes and benefits affect incentives to work and earn more, and the way in which they redistribute income.
We review popular evaluation methods in policy analysis, showing the relationship between social experiments (randomised control trials), matching methods, instrumental variables, and control functions.
This presentation was delivered as part of the PEPA contribution to the 2012 ESRC Research Methods Festival.
In an empirical analysis, we exploit the age eligibility restriction in the Swedish Youth Practice subsidized work program for young unemployed, where compliance is imperfect among the young.
The matching method for treatment evaluation does not balance selective unobserved differences between treated and non-treated. We derive a simple correction term if there is an instrument that shifts the treatment probability to zero in specific cases.
