Pablo Brugarolas

I am a second-year PhD candidate in Economics working under the supervision of Sara Ayllón (University of Girona & IZA).

In January 2024, I will be joining LSE’s Department of Social Policy as a Visiting PhD Research Student, where I will have the opportunity to work with Almudena Sevilla (LSE & IZA).

I am passionately engaged in family economics, economics of human development, education economics, economics of poverty and inequality, and causal-inference methods. My thesis delves into the impacts of universal childcare policies. The first chapter uses modern meta-analysis techniques to analyze whether causal estimates of the impact of enrolling into universal childcare programs on children’s development are affected by publication bias. In the second chapter, I explore the effects of income-adjusted childcare fees on immigrant children’s enrollment in Catalonia, leveraging a staggered event study design. The third chapter assesses the long-term developmental returns of Barcelona’s public childcare expansion, using a recent difference-in-differences design for continuous treatments to compare health, education, and labor market achievements across children cohorts and districts.