Alejandra Villegas

I am an academic researcher in the Department of Economics at Universidad Iberoamericana Mexico City.

I am interested in understanding how social norms are formed and enforced, and how they shape labor allocation, economic agency, and financial inclusion, with a particular focus on gender norms. I combine behavioral experiments, structural modeling, and large-scale microdata to generate policy-relevant evidence on inequality and social reproduction.

I currently teach Gender Economics in the B.A. program in Economics at Universidad Iberoamericana, and I serve as Editorial Manager of Sobre México Economic Journal, a peer-reviewed journal on economics and public policy.

I hold an M.A. in Economics from Universitat Pompeu Fabra – Barcelona School of Economics and a B.A. in Economics from Universidad Católica Boliviana. In 2025, I earned my Ph.D. in Gender Studies from Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City. During my doctoral studies, I was a Visiting Scholar at the School of Economics and Management , University of Florence, supported by an Erasmus+ Grant.

My job market paper, The Weight of Expectation: Behavioral Evidence on Gender Norm Enforcement, provides causal evidence of asymmetric sanctions in the enforcement of gender norms. Using incentivized norm elicitation and a randomized behavioral experiment, I identify behavioral sanctions that reveal the relational and hierarchical structure of gender norm enforcement—mechanisms that sustain inequality even in the absence of formal constraints.

Research interests: Development economics; Gender economics; Experimental methods; Social norms and labor allocation; Financial inclusion; Behavioral economics.

Upcoming presentations:

September 2026:

 • Advances with Field Experiments (AFE) Conference. Becker Friedman Institute for Economics, University of Chicago. Chicago, USA (17-18 September).

Recent presentations: 

June 2026:

 • 21st World Congress. International Economic Association (IEA). Belgrade, Serbia (22–26 June 2026)