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 joined the Department in 2020 as an LSE Fellow.  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 an elected member of the EUROMOD Scientific Advisory Board. I am also 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.

My research interests include:


My CV    -   Google Scholar   -  IDEAS/RePEc   -   ORCiD

Contact:  i.tasseva "at" lse.ac.uk

Twitter: @IvaTasseva


New Working Papers: 

The Persistence of Income Reporting Errors in Household Survey Data

This is joint work with Christopher R. Bollinger, University of Kentucky. We examine the extent and persistence of income misreporting in household survey data. We use a unique panel of survey data – the Austrian version of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (SILC) for 2008-2011 – which have been linked to individual administrative records on both state unemployment benefits and earnings. We find that misreporting earnings and benefits receipt in one year increases the probability to continue doing so in subsequent years. This causes large errors in transitions in and out of earnings and benefits receipt, leading to a biased picture of earnings dynamics and government programme participation. The persistent error pattern has important implications for policy and research, as we demonstrate by examining poverty dynamics. Since transitions in and out of benefits and earnings receipt are misreported, the survey income reports bias downward estimates for poverty persistence and entry, and upward estimates for poverty exit.