Bio and CV

You can see here my full CV , but below you have my story.

Research

Since my first contact with research at UPenn ten years ago I have worked on multiple topics, but currently, my expertise revolves around three topics: the economics of the household, political polarization, and data-science.

Economics of the household.

I like to label myself as a "household economist", a wrap-up for three interrelated faces of my research. 

Firstly, my work currently focuses on the intersection between economic and demographic phenomena. Since 2022, I have had the life-changing experience of working with Libertad González. We have several ongoing projects: the effect of partisanship and elections on fertility, how parental leave affects time use within the household, and how it impacts on firms. 

Secondly, inequality and labor markets were the reason why I originally ventured into research and also why I sometimes don't sleep at night. I was part of the Spanish team of the Deaton Review. Within the Gender Group where along with Andrea Weber and Laura Hospido, we studied gender gaps across countries (paper).

At the crossroads of my interest in inequality and population is my research with Maria Sánchez-Dominguez on how the child penalty and the burden of care affect the integration of female immigrants (see this paper and this working paper). 

With my former supervisor, Pablo Beramendi, we have just written a chapter examining the historical roots of inequality (which will come soon in this book) in Spain, and its link with family ties, industrialization, and dual labor markets. 

Finally, a substantial part of my work revolved around economic expectations. As part of my job at the Spanish HFCS unit, I have studied how the measurement of economic expectations --specifically, uncertainty-- through surveys. Expectations were, in fact, the core of my dissertation at Duke, but this is better explained in the context of my research on politics. 

The political economy of polarization  

I wrote my dissertation at Duke on political polarization. When I started drafting it, I was back at the Bank of Spain, and I thus tried to answer the question: why could political polarization influence the action of a central bank?

The first angle to consider this question was the impact on economic variables. Economic expectations were a natural first step. I thus produced several papers (one published in the European Economic Review) showing that, in polarized societies, partisanship is likely to dominate in how households form their expectations (above other forces, like macroeconomic variables or individual economic conditions). 

Beyond expectations, I also explored (along with Gonzalo Rivero) how polarization affects the trust in independent institutions (wp here), like Central Banks. 

But, does partisanship also affect behavior? This is where my work with Libertad on Partisan Abortions comes in. In that paper, we used administrative data to show that, beyond trust and expectations declared in surveys, partisanship also affects marriages and fertility decisions. 

Data-science and econometrics

Not that long ago, my twitter bio labeled me as someone primarily interested in structural estimation, statistical programming, hierarchical Bayesian models,  text-analysis, and survey methodology. I have been passionate about writing code and crunching data since I took Beka Steorts course in data science at Duke. And I still sometimes fantasize about writing the sequel of her paper on Small Area Estimation of rental prices.

I am now more humble and consider myself just an applied researcher with some programming skills. This is somehow how I have found my way into a Central Bank, as I have participated in projects public debt simulations, calibrating on BVARs, conflict forecasting, the regional effects of EU funds on human capital, or how to measure uncertainty with probabilistic questions in surveys.