Bellés, Cristina

Cristina’s research bridges labor, gender, health, and education economics, highlighting how labor market policies and social interventions affect education, health, fertility, and violence. Her current projects examine the implications of Spanish pension reforms—such as raising the retirement age, introducing maternity pension supplements, and revising contributory periods—on health and the gender pension gap. She also investigates the roots of gender-based violence, focusing on how constraints in healthcare access influence victims’ willingness to seek help. Furthermore, she investigates how social pensions impact the incidence of intimate partner violence among older women. Her evidence-based research aims to inform public policies that have the objective of reducing gender inequalities throughout the life cycle.

Before joining the Institute for Economic Analysis in December 2024, Cristina Bellés-Obrero served as a “Beatriu de Pinós” postdoctoral researcher at the University of Barcelona (2023–2024), a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Mannheim (2018–2023), and a visiting professor at the University of Girona (2017–2018). She earned her PhD in Economics from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in 2017. Besides her role at CSIC and the Barcelona School of Economics, she is currently a research affiliate at the Barcelona Institute of Economics and a research fellow at IZA.

Cristina’s work centers on labor, gender, health, and education economics. Her research has appeared in leading journals such as the Journal of Human Resources, Health Economics, Journal of Population Economics, Economic Development and Cultural Change, and the Economics of Education Review. She has engaged actively in dissemination through popular economics blogs, including Nada es gratis, VoxDev, Barcelona SE Voice, and IZA Newsroom. Over the years, she has participated in several national and international research projects, both as a pre-doctoral researcher (ECO2012-35545) and during her postdoctoral years (ECO2017-82350-R, SGR 00355, and CRC TR 224 [EpoS]). Cristina’s work has been recognized with prestigious grants, such as the CAF Prize for research on child marriages in Mexico, the Fundació Banc Sabadell grant for her PhD field experiment, the GDLab Gender and Diversity Knowledge Initiative for intimate partner violence research, and a Fundación Ramón Areces social sciences grant.