Lorena Popescu

I am a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the University of Padua and ARERA, the Italian Regulatory Authority for Energy, Networks and Environment, where I evaluate Italy's electricity and gas social bonus using administrative billing microdata. I am also a Research Associate at OIPE, the Italian Observatory on Energy Poverty. My work sits at the intersection of energy, environmental, and health economics, and applies causal inference methods to large administrative datasets to measure how policy shapes household consumption, affordability, and health.

Before Padua I completed a Ph.D. in Economics and Statistics at the University of Milan-Bicocca, with a dissertation on residential heating and the health costs of air pollution in Italy and Southern Europe, and a research period in the Environment and Energy group at VATT in Helsinki. I hold an M.Sc. in Statistical and Economic Methods for Decision-Making from the University of Turin.