I am a Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Queen Mary University of London. 

My interests and expertise are at the intersection of political economy, labour, development and public economics. 

I am also a Research Associate at CEP, at the London School of Economics, a Research Fellow of CEPR, IZA and CesIfo. Until January 2024 was a joint Managing Editor of The Economic Journal. In the past, I have been, among others, recipient of the Nuffield Foundation New Development Fellowship in the Social Sciences, a Research Fellow at the LSE and Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley, Visiting Professor at Princeton University, EIEF and Bocconi University.

I have written and researched on Latin America, Europe, the USA and Africa and  contributed to different streams of literature, including on Migration, Family Arrangements, Fertility, Child Labor, Schooling, Early Child Development, Social Protection, Unemployment, Skills Mismatch, Labor Market Informality, Wage Inequality, Violence, Corruption, Voting and Political participation. My work appears among others, in The American Economic Review, Econometrica, The American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, The American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, The Journal of the European Economic Association, The Review of Economics and Statistics, The Journal of Labor Economics, The Journal of Public Economics and The Journal of Development Economics

My research is regularly featured in the media, including The Guardian, The Financial Time, The Economist, Le Monde, The Independent, TIME Magazine, The Daily Telegraph, Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica. I am also an occasional TV and Radio commentator, having appeared on Al Jazeera, CNN, BBC, Voice of America.

I have an interest in the interaction between research and policy making. In the past, I have been a member of the OECD Scientific Committee for the Review of Labor Migration Policy in the EU and Lead Research Advisor for UCW, the UNICEF-ILO-World Bank program on child labor and, in this role, member of the United States Department of Labour Education Initiative Technical Advisory Group. I have worked on the design and evaluation of the Uruguayan Plan de Atencion Nacional a la Emergencia Social. I have also been part of the Inter-American Development Bank Crime Prevention Roundtable and have advised and consulted for the Inter-American Development Bank, the Word Bank, UNICEF and ILO on themes of labor markets, social assistance, early child development and citizens’ security. 

I hold a Masters in Economics from the London School of Economics (1994) and a Ph.D. in Economics from UCL (2000). I am fluent in English and Spanish, I have a working knowledge of both French and Portuguese and Italian is my mother tongue.