Welcome to my personal site!

About me

Welcome! I am a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

I am an applied development and labor economist working at the intersection of governance and human capital, with a focus on gender, health, crime, and education. My work connects human capital investment with economic security, studying how public policy and institutions shape investments in health and education, labor-market choices, firm behavior, and responses to gender-based violence and crime.

A first strand of my research develops and validates measurement techniques for sensitive and underreported phenomena, particularly sexual harassment and extortion. A second strand examines the gap between providing public infrastructure and sustaining its benefits. I study how gender roles, collective action, and local accountability shape the maintenance of public housing and shared sanitation, with consequences for health, living conditions, and the long-term value of public investment. Throughout my research agenda, I work closely with governments and implementing partners to design and evaluate impactful and cost-effective interventions addressing these and other policy challenges before they are implemented more broadly or scaled up. My work combines field experiments and quasi-experimental methods, drawing on primary data collected through purpose-built survey instruments as well as administrative data.

Before beginning my Ph.D., I was a Pre-Doctoral Research Fellow at Duke University and a Senior Research Associate at Innovations for Poverty Action, working on projects in Peru, Pakistan, and Paraguay. My current doctoral projects, undertaken independently or with peer graduate-student collaborators, span Peru, Uganda, Ghana, Colombia, and the United States. My goal across projects is to understand not only whether policies work but also why, for whom, and under what institutional conditions they can be scaled.

Contact

You can contact me at gustavoa@umich.edu.