Mayoral, Laura

Laura’s work sits at the intersection of political economy, econometrics, and applied machine learning. Her current projects examine the economic and institutional roots of conflict—investigating how state capacity, religious beliefs, and other economic factors relate to political instability—and explore new ways to measure poverty, inequality, and household consumption by combining satellite imagery and survey micro-data with modern ML techniques. She is also developing forecasting tools for democratic backsliding and refugee flows. Methodologically, she draws on both micro- and macro-level information, occasionally incorporates historical and archeological sources, and experiments with high-dimensional estimators suited to data-scarce environments. Earlier work focused on modelling highly persistent economic processes, the aggregation of heterogeneous agents, and time-series methods that improve inference when persistence is very high.

Laura Mayoral is a tenured researcher at the Institute for Economic Analysis (CSIC) and a research affiliate of the Barcelona School of Economics. She earned her PhD in Economics from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and has held visiting professorships at INSEAD (Singapore and Paris), the Paris School of Economics, New York University (Abu Dhabi), and the University of Gothenburg. An affiliate of CEPR, she leads the Institutions, Democracy, and Peace theme within its RECIPE project. Her research—spanning political economy, conflict analysis, and both applied and theoretical econometrics—has appeared in Science, the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of Monetary Economics, the Journal of Public Economics, the Journal of Economic Growth, and the International Economic Review, among other leading journals.