Barbara Boggiano

Contact:  bboggiano@uahurtado.cl

As an applied microeconometrician by training, my research interests lie in gender issues, underrepresented peoples, and visible minorities studies. My published work  has examined the long-term effects of armed conflict on intimate partner violence and the impact of air pollution on public healthcare costs in the UK.

Strands of my current research span several fields. In labour, gender, and development, I study how trade exposure shapes job-finding rates and within-tradables reabsorption to generate gender gaps beyond wage adjustments; how high-skilled seasonal employment affects women's fertility decisions; how to reconstruct concept-consistent long-run labour formality series across Argentina's redesigned Permanent Household Survey; and how pet ownership functions as a demand for emotional goods under conditions of extreme material scarcity among people experiencing homelessness. In education economics, I examine whether for-profit management shapes educational inputs and student performance within Chile's universal voucher system. In household finance and ageing, I provide causal evidence on the marginal propensity to repay debt among older adults in Canada, exploiting a government payment discontinuity at ages 73–74. In crime and media markets, I examine how the absence of local media coverage affects crime reporting. Finally, in historical demography, I revisit the contested population losses of the Paraguayan War (1864–1870) using newly digitised military-administrative records from the Archivo Nacional de Asunción to adjudicate between high- and low-loss estimates.

I joined the Department of Economics at the Universidad Alberto Hurtado as an Assistant Professor in August 2024. Before my current role, I was a  Mitacs Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Alberta and the Bank of Canada. Prior to that, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Chair of Economic Policy at the University of Potsdam and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Economics at the University of Hamburg and the Hamburg Center for Health Economics (HCHE).