Caterina Astarita is Associate Research Fellow in the Jobs and Skills Unit at CEPS. She is expert in revenue and taxation policies of the EU, social and labourmarket policies, inequality, and poverty measures with almost ten years of professional experience in the academic research sector, as well as, in the European Commission. She researched these fields with state of art quantitative/econometric approach. Her research interests encompass, as well, monetary economics and economics of organized crime.
In project management Caterina has various years of experience in supervising research groups gained while working at the European Commission in teams with external partners and contractors. As far as revenue and taxation policies are concerned, between 2013 and 2016, Caterina’s work focussed on various aspects of tax system optimal design and redistributive effects of taxation. For social and labour market policies: in 2012, as well as between 2016 and 2018, Caterina worked on social expenditure, social inclusion indicators and labour market participation of secondary earners. She started working on inequality and poverty measured during her Ph.D., and, passionate about this field, she continued during her career by working on the impact of taxation and other structural reforms on income inequality and poverty. More recently, in 2020, she conducted research on poverty vulnerability and on the effectiveness of public policies in tackling poverty during the 2008 crisis. In addition to studies and reports, she has published in peer-revieved journals in the area of fiscal and monetary economics.
Using quantitative methods is the core of Caterina’s work. This includes data managing of large-scale databases, construction/calculation of indexes and indicator-based algorithms, macro and microdata analysis with using: descriptive/inferential statistics, panel data models estimators, limited dependent variable models, discrete choice models estimators and microsimulation models (e.g. EUROMOD). She also has experience in various aspects of data collection and database design and maintenance.
Caterina holds a Ph.D. degree in Economics from the University of Naples “Federico II” (Italy), a M.Sc. in Economics from the Birkbeck College –University of London (UK) and graduated with honours in Political Science at the University of Naples “Federico II” (Italy) with a specialization in Administrative Sciences.
Mother tongue Italian, she is fluent in English and has intermediate knowledge of French.
