Iva Valentinova Tasseva

I am an Assistant Professor in International Social and Public Policy in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science.  I previously worked as a researcher at the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex, where I completed my PhD in Economics.

I am a member of the Welfare and Policy society (WAP). I am an invited expert at the Steering Committee for the "Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission and Economic and Social Research Institute joint Research Programme 2023-2024", with a focus on Economic Equality. I was previously an elected member of the EUROMOD Scientific Advisory Board. 

My research interests include:

• inequality and household living standards

• the redistributive effects of income tax and social security benefit policies

• tax-benefit microsimulation

• measurement errors in the income reports in household surveys

My CV    -   Google Scholar   -  IDEAS/RePEc   -   ORCiD

Contact:  i.tasseva "at" lse.ac.uk

Twitter: @IvaTasseva

New Working Papers: 

The role of social protection benefits during crisis: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa (with Katrin Gasior and Gemma Wright)

The effectiveness of social protection during economic shocks depends on two types of benefit: non-shock-responsive benefits, fixed prior to crisis, and automatic stabilisers, which adjust with income or employment losses. We analyse effectiveness in seven Sub-Saharan African countries using tax-benefit microsimulation models and household survey data. Simulating employment losses, we apply a decomposition framework to isolate the role of each benefit type. We find that high pre-crisis coverage of non-shock-responsive benefits in Ghana and Zambia and income-related automatic stabilisers in South Africa provide an income floor for poor households. South Africa’s unemployment insurance further mitigates losses among better-off households. In contrast, limited protection is available in Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda, where benefits are modest, coverage gaps substantial, and automatic stabilisers ineffective due to absent unemployment insurance, reliance on proxy means-tests, and narrow eligibility.

Errors in survey and administrative data on employment earnings: Austria and the United Kingdom compared (with  Christopher R. Bollinger, Stephen P. Jenkins and Fernando Rios-Avila )

We contribute new cross-national evidence about the nature of measurement errors in employment earnings, fitting the same error components model to harmonised earnings data for Austria and the UK. The model allows for measurement error in the administrative data and linkage error as well as survey measurement error. We find several cross-national similarities in error structure but also intriguing differences in error component probabilities, means, and dispersions.