Maria Marta Ferreyra is a senior economist at the Global Engagement and Knowledge office of the Education Global Practice of The World Bank. Her research specializes in the Economics of Education. She has written about the effects of large-scale policies in primary and secondary education in the United States, including school choice programs such as private school vouchers and charter schools, and public schools’ finance and accountability. 

At the World Bank she has studied higher education in the developing world, with a special focus on Latin America and the Caribbean. For this region, she has led comprehensive studies on higher education and on short-cycle higher education programs (lasting two or three years), and has co-led a study on cities and productivity. As part of these studies, she has conducted research on higher education supply, quality,  and finance, and on higher education impacts on labor markets and the spatial distribution of human capital. She is currently part of the core team of the World Development Report 2024 on growth in middle-income countries, where she studies the role of education in social mobility, innovation, and growth.

Her research has been published in journals such as the American Economic Review,  the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Public Economics, and the American Economic Journal-Economic Policy. Prior to joining the World Bank, she served as a faculty member at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University. She holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She lives with her husband and daughters in Washington, D.C.