Calsamiglia Costa, Caterina – ICREA Memoir 2021

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 and to develop non cognitive assessment tools. 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. Her leadership in an interdisciplinary group of researchers working on socioemotional learning led the creation of Pentabilities, a method to promote formative assessment for socioemotional learning.

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. She is currently working very closely with the education sector, promoting the implementation and evaluation of rigurous formative assessment tools for socioemotional learning in primary, secondary, vocational training and college worldwide.

Selected publications

– Calsamiglia, Caterina; Martinez-Mora, Francisco; Miralles, Antonio 2021, “School choice design, risk aversion and cardinal segregation”, Economic Journal, 131, 635, 1081 – 1104.

– Calsamiglia, Caterina; Martinez-Mora, Francisco; Miralles, Antonio 2021, ‘Random assignments and outside options’, Social Choice and Welfare, 57.

– Arenas, Andreu; Calsamiglia, Caterina; Loviglio, Annalisa 2021, ‘What is at stake without high-stakes exams? Students’ evaluation and admission to college at the time of COVID-19′, Economics of Education Review, 83, 102143.

Selected research activities

She is in the Executive Committee of Matching in Practice a European network of economists, computer scientists and socioelogists working on various aspects of assignment and matchin in education and realted markets.

She has been the Head of Research of Badi, an online platform connecting room renters with room seekers for mid-term rentals. She led two research projects that used the platform data to evaluate the efficiency and fairness of their matching procedures.

Since 2017 she’s been a member of the European Economic Association Standing Committee on Research and a respresentative for the Econometric Society in the Woman in Economics initiative.