Dr. Isabel Z. Martínez

I am an Economist working on topics around the distribution of income and wealth, how we tax these things, and how people adjust their behavior to taxes.

Since April 2020, I hold a research position at KOF Institute at ETH in Zurich. During the Fall term 2021/2022, I was Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the City University of New York (CUNY). I am a CEPR and a CESifo Research Affiliate, a Fellow of the World Inequality Database Project (WID.world) and of the SIAW Institute at the University of St.Gallen, where I completed my PhD in 2016. From fall 2017 until spring 2020 I worked as an economist for the Swiss Federation of Trade Unions SGB-USS. Since 2018, I represent the trade unions in the Swiss Competition Commission as an elected Member of the Commission.

My academic work has a strong policy focus, and I regularly contribute to print media or appear on TV or the radio. I have been listed among the top 10 of the most influential economists in Switzerland in the NZZ Ökonom*innen-Ranking, and I am listed among the top 5% female economists (out of over 17,000 listed female economists) in the global RePEc database (based on last 10 years publications).

Together with a group of Swiss economists, I initiated trendEcon, an open-source project where we have developed daily economic indicators for Switzerland based on Google searches to monitor the economy during the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond.

Here you find my full CV for download and my contact information.