Laura is a Research Fellow of the IFS. Her current work focuses on tax and social protection policy and programme evaluation in developing countries. She is also a Research Associate with ODI, collaborating with the Development and Public Finance team.
She works closely with and is one of the founders of the Centre for Tax Analysis in Developing Countries (TAXDEV), delivered jointly by IFS and ODI since 2018. This programme aims at generating new research, analysis and in-country analytical capacity in tax and benefit policy and administration in (or of relevance to) lower- and middle-income countries. More recently she has focused on the role of tax and transfers in shaping income and time use gaps between genders across countries with different levels of development. She has also been involved in a range of programme evaluations, including around sanitation and water.
Education
PhD Economics, University College London, 2015
MSc Economics, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2003
BA (summa cum laude) Economics, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 2000
This Observation article reviews research evaluating umbrella programmes in Latin America which aim to reduce extreme poverty. The results provide more evidence of the importance of precise policy design and the difficulty of scaling up programmes to a national level.
Promoting the social inclusion of the extreme poor on a large scale in developing countries: what do we know?
This article was published in Spanish on the website of Foco Economico, a website featuring blog pieces on politics and economics, relating particularly to Latin America.
In this paper the authors examine the distributional and efficiency case for VAT rate differentiation in Mexico, and analyse the effects of the 2010 reforms to Mexico’s tax system, making use of a tax micro-simulation model, MEXTAX.
This paper evaluates the large scale pilot of an innovative and major welfare intervention in Colombia, which combines homes visits by trained social workers to households in extreme poverty with preferential access to social programs.
Drawing on the seminal Mirrlees Review, this report sets out the basic principles of good tax design and reform, with a particular focus on the implications for middle income countries such as Turkey.
The World Bank commissioned the IFS to develop a tax simulator for El Salvador, with an aim of increasing capacity for the distributional and revenue analysis of tax reforms in this country. This is the final paper of this project.
Multinational firms outsourcing or offshoring their operations to developing countries is a problem as old as globalisation. This column looks at the effect on high-skilled labour in the home country. It presents evidence that, on average, when firms start employing high-skilled workers offshore, they also increase the number of this type of worker employed at home.
This is the final paper of a study aimed at building capacity for the distributional analysis of tax reforms in Mexico and other similar middle‐income countries.
We investigate evidence for spatially mediated knowledge transfer from university research. We examine whether firms locate R&D near universities, and whether those that do are more likely to co-operate with, or source knowledge from them.
We use unique workplace and employee-level data to evaluate a major UK government pilot program to increase qualification-based, employer-provided training for low-qualified employees.
This paper lays out the methodological issues involved in finding the distributional impact of the tax changes in Mexica and describes the approach the authors will take in their analysis.
We investigate the idea that increased use of ICT has facilitated outsourcing of business services, and that these are complementary activities in production because they allow firms to focus on their core competencies.
This paper investigates co-operative research activity by firms using data from the 3rd Community Innovation Survey for four countries, France, Germany, Spain and the UK.
We examine whether firms locate their R&D labs near universities, and whether those that do are more likely to co-operate with, or source knowledge from universities.
