Marta is a Research Associate of IFS, working at the Centre for Evaluation of Development Policies (EDePo) at the IFS. She works at the Inter-American Development Bank.
She previously worked at the Centre as an ESRC Post-Doctoral Fellow. From 2009-2011, she held a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship. Marta's research interests are in human capital investment decisions in developing countries, and in particular in early childhood development (ECD), education, and intra-household resource allocation. She is very interested in understanding the determinants of ECD and identifying programs that promote it. Marta's current research includes the design, implementation and evaluation of child psycho-social stimulation and nutritional supplementation programs targeted to very young children and their mothers in Colombia and India. She is also working on the identification of tools that allow measuring ECD outcomes amongst very young children in a cost-efficient manner, and are hence suitable for large scale evaluations. Marta has extensive experience in the evaluation of social and educational government programs in Latin America, including the Mexican Conditional Cash Transfer program.
Education
PhD Economics, University of Toulous I, 2006
Diplome Europeen d'Economie Quantitative Approfondie (DEEQA) , University of Toulouse I, 2002
Diplome d'Etudes Approfondies (DEA) Mathematical Economics and Econometrics, University of Toulouse I, 2001
We study the socio-economic gradient of child development on a representative sample of low- and middle-income children aged 6-42 months in Bogota, using the Bayley Scales of Infant Development, a high quality test based on direct observation of the child’s abilities.
Despite the rapid expansion and increasing importance of private education in developing countries, very little is known about the impact of studying in private schools on educational attainment and wages. This paper contributes to fi lling this gap by estimating the returns to private high schools in Mexico.
This article outlines how a home visiting intervention in Colombia, delivered at scale through partnering with existing social welfare systems, successfully increased the variety of play materials and play activities in poor households with children aged between 1 and 2 years at the start of the intervention.
Despite the rapid expansion and increasing importance of private education in developing countries, very little is known about the impact of studying in private schools on educational attainment and wages. This paper contributes to fi lling this gap by estimating the returns to private high schools in Mexico.
Primary school enrolment and completion rates are almost universal in rural Mexico. In this paper, we investigate whether the primary school transfer generates positive externalities in the household.
This paper evaluates AGEs (Apoyo a la Gestion Escolar or School Management Support) and examines whether the increased parental participation that they brought about helped to create a more conducive learning environment and improve students' learning outcomes.
