Caterina Calsamiglia Costa

Institute for Political Economy and Governance

Social & Behavioural Sciences

Currently a Research Professor at IPEG and affiliate researcher at CEPR. She obtained her PhD from the Department of Economics at Yale University in 2005. She was an assistant and associate professor at UAB until 2015. In 2014 she obtained an ERC Starting Grant to work on understanding the importance of the design of school choice procedures for the educational landscape. Since 2011 she is a member of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity group at the University of Chicago. In 2015 she moved to CEMFI as a Research Professor, where she remains an affiliate researcher. She recently started working on measuring and assessing non cognitive traits by leading an interdisciplinary group of researchers. She’s the scientific advisor of Escola Nova 21, an alliance of schools and other public and civil society institutions for an advanced education system.


Research interests

Her research focuses on Public Economics with an emphasis on school choice, educational policies, affirmative action, measurement of non-cognitive skills and welfare economics in general. Her work includes theoretical, experimental and empirical analysis.


Selected research activities

Professor Calsamiglia started as an ICREA Researcher at IPEG on October 1, 2017. Before that she was at CEMFI, in Madrid, where she started working on her ERC Starting Grant on the design of school choice procedures and its impact on the segregation and equity properties of the education system. She also started collaborating as the Scientific Advisor of Escola Nova 21, an alliance of schools and other public and civil society institutions for an advanced education system. In particular she is leading an interdisciplinary group of researcher that are aiming at measuring the outcomes in schools through richer set of tools that shall capture non only cognitive, but also non cognitive skills that students may develop in schools. This shall help school progress towards new educational systems by providing an evaluation of the impact that their innovations may have. Professor Calsamiglia was invited to give a Lecture at the ECNAIS conference “Modern soft skills in value based school programmes. The independent schools’ response to the challenge of improving the social and economic future of young people.” She was also invited to give a talk at the European Economics Association Meeting on “New Administrative Data and New Research Designs in Economics” and has been invited to be a member of the EEA Research Committee to facilitate data access to researcher throughout Europe.