Valerie is an applied microeconomist, interested in understanding the behaviour of individuals, both theoretically and empirically, with the aim of informing policy. Part of her research focuses on modelling intra-household behaviour in order to understand how individuals interact to reach the decisions whose consequences we see. She is particularly interested in applying these models in the context of developing economies. She also has a long-standing interest in consumption and demand, which has informed both her research and policy oriented work, conducted for UK government bodies. She also works on health.
She was educated in France, where she obtained a PhD from Delta-Ehess. She is a Reader (Associate Professor) in the Department of Economics at UCL and a Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Currently, she is the Director of the BSc in Economics at UCL.
Education
PhD Economics, EHESS, 1993
Diplôme (DEA) d'Etudes Approfondies, EHESS, 1989
Magistère (MA) de Sciences Economiques, Paris I - Panthéon – Sorbonne, EHESS, and Ecole Normale Supérieure (joint), 1988
We show that observed behaviour can be rationalised by the fact that the shadow price of home-cooked food, which accounts for the fact that cooking takes time, has risen relative to the price of ready-to-eat food.
Individuals may be poor even if their household is not poor, because the intra-household distribution of resources may be unequal. We develop a model wherein the resource share of each person in a collective household - defined as their share of household consumption - may be estimated by simple linear regressions using off-the-shelf consumer expenditure micro-data.
This paper studies the differential effect of targeting cash transfers to men or women on the structure of household expenditures on non-durables. We study a policy intervention in the Republic of Macedonia, offering cash transfers to poor households, conditional on having their children attending secondary school.
estimate and test the restrictions of a collective model of household consumption, using z-conditional demands, in the context of a large conditional cash transfer program in rural Mexico. The model can explain the impacts of the program on the structure of food consumption.
In this paper, we estimate a collective model of household consumption and test the restrictions of collective rationality using z-conditional demands in the context of a large Conditional Cash Transfer programme in rural Mexico.
