Interests

Research Interests

My main interest is the mechanisms behind economic distortions, focusing on the effects on agents and the possibility of improving their welfare. I study under the prism of public economics, using theoretical and empirical tools. My primary intention is to understand the optimal design of policy instruments to fix economic distortions. As a second research line, I'm interested in the economics of education.

In public economics, I'm broadly interested in the mechanisms behind distortions in policy instruments, such as taxes, public goods, or audits. Also, I am interested in studying how those distortions impact inequality and efficiency and the way to overcome it. My research focuses on how a government can solve those economic distortions using its instruments and improving social welfare. 

I am working on several different lines. First, I am working on distortion produced by income tax evasion in tax administration policies and public goods provision in an economy with an endogenous occupational choice. Second, I am working on the effect of income tax evasion on the decision to work in the self-employed sector from an empirical view, inquiring about the connection between evasion and self-employment. Finally, I'm involved in a project to estimate the VAT gap in a sub-Saharan country and study the behavior of firms related to this.

Concerning the economics of education, I am interested in the effect of some policies on the education system and the student's educational outcomes. Examples of this (and some projects) are 1) the optimal provision of education or optimal educational quality and how to finance it; and 2) the interaction within the school through tracking or peer effect, focusing on the strategic behavior within the school and the way to use it to improve educational outcomes.

Teaching Interests

I see the learning process as one of the most valuable things in the society conformation because it produces a deep comprehension of different historical processes, the society configuration, and social behavior. Also, it provides the essential information to live and learn a more sophisticated knowledge. For these reasons, I believe teaching is a knowledge facilitator process, and the role of a teacher is to conduct this. My principals teaching interests lie in the following: