Marta is a Senior Research Economist in the Centre for Evaluation of Development Policy at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (EDePo@IFS). She joined the Centre in 2007 as an ESRC Post-Doctoral Fellow. From 2009-2011, she held a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship.
Her 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. Marta is very interested in understanding the determinants of ECD and identifying programs that promote it.
Her 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 also extensive experience in the evaluation of social and educational government programs in Latin American, including the Mexican Conditional Cash Transfer program.
