Laura Chioda is a Senior Economist in the Office of the Chief Economist of the Latin America and Caribbean Region and in the Office of the Chief Economist for Equitable Growth, Finance, and Institutions at the World Bank. She received her PhD in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining the World Bank, Laura was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Princeton University. Her research interests range from theoretical econometric issues of identification, limits of experiments, and weak identification to behavioral economics, intra-household decisions, and crime and violence. She is the author of the Regional Study on crime and violence prevention in Latin America and Caribbean titled “Stop the Violence in Latin America: A Look at Prevention from Cradle to Adulthood,” and of another Regional Study on gender and labor markets in Latin America titled “Work and Family: Latin American and Caribbean Women in Search of a New Balance.” She has also co-authored the World Bank report “Making Brazilians Safer: Analyzing the Dynamics of Violent Crime.” Her research includes published and ongoing work on the impacts of conditional cash transfers on crime and violence in Brazil, and on the human and economic costs of violence induced by Mexico’s “kingpin” strategy. As a member of the World Bank’s Development Impact Evaluation Initiative (DIME), Laura co-leads DIME’s Program on Fragility, Conflict, and Crime and Violence. She has contributed to the evaluations of social programs in Rio de Janeiro. She also serves as principal investigator on ongoing evaluations of crime prevention programs studying the roles of social networks and labor market and soft skills interventions in shaping antisocial behavior. In Honduras, she studies whether vocational and soft skills training can break the vicious cycle between low productivity and high crime and violence; in Mexico, she leads an experimental impact evaluation of a cognitive behavioral therapy-based intervention targeting at-risk young men.
