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, the impact of air pollution on public healthcare costs in the UK. More recently, I ask whether for-profit management shapes educational inputs and student performance within Chile's universal voucher system, and I revisit the contested demographic losses of the Paraguayan War (1864–1870) using newly digitised military-administrative records from the Archivo Nacional de Asunción (accepted, Latin American Research Review).

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 how Chile's shift from a student-loan regime (CAE) to tuition-free higher education (Gratuidad) affects graduates' entry into the labour market. 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.

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).